


Through a Glass Darkly

by lustmordred



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bestiality, Bondage, Demon Sam Winchester, Demons, Dom/sub, M/M, Sado-Masochism, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-03
Updated: 2011-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:02:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders that love so wretched can still, after all, be love. Even when it’s not the monster under his bed he’s afraid of; it’s the one in it</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through a Glass Darkly

**Author's Note:**

> The dog, Harvey, is named after the dog by the same name accused of driving David Berkowitz insane.

Laying there in the dark beside his brother, tangled in sheets, dotted with shadows, slick and cold with his own cooling sweat, Dean watches Sam fall asleep and wonders. Not for the first time, he wonders… How is evil brought into the world? Is it born or is it made?

He looks at Sammy, reaches out his hand to let Sammy’s damp hair slide through his fingers, and wonders… Either way, how does it sleep at night?

Sam’s eyes move beneath his lids and Dean takes his hand away, afraid to wake him. He likes it when Sammy sleeps. When Sammy sleeps, he can look at him and the part of him, the tiny, deep, glowing part of him that is always afraid is just a little bit smaller.

Dean slowly gets up from the bed and stands beside it for a little while, just watching Sam sleep with the faint yellowed light from the window across the room leaving spots and stripes over his face. It’s pretty. _He_ is pretty. Even now, with all that he’s become, Sam is beautiful and even that tiny scared part of Dean that wishes it could can’t lie and say otherwise.

But Dean knows that some of the most wicked creatures are also some of the most lovely. You can admire the perfect almond shape of their eyes and the slant of their cheekbones as you beg them for mercy.

With a humorless chuff of laughter, Dean moves away from the bed as far as the cuff around his ankle will allow and sits on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up. He lets his head relax back on the windowsill of the big round bay window behind him and closes his eyes. He can feel the silence like a touch, heavy with the desire to break at any moment and it makes his skin rise with gooseflesh. He shivers lightly and wraps his arms around his knees, thinking how much he would like to wash the sticky drying cold of sex off his body.

He starts to count the minutes until morning, not entirely sure if he wants it to come or wants it to stay away.

He thinks about the knife he has hidden from Sammy in a tear in their mattress. Then his eyes dart to the fathomless dark beneath their bed and he looks as though searching for something.

He remembers Sam’s blood on his hands, on his lips. There is a scar there still, slanted at an angle down his throat toward his collarbone. Dean remembers how the blade of the knife in his hand scraped against that bone before it stuck. He remembers promising _anything_ , remembers promising _forever_ without counting the cost, with no concept of just how long forever can really be.

He wonders that love so wretched can still, after all, _be_ love. Even when it’s not the monster under his bed he’s afraid of; it’s the one _in_ it.

~~*~~

“Just do it,” Sam hissed at him, his fingers like bands of iron around Dean’s, right down to the cold way they stung when Sam tightened his grip. “The world’s all painted black and white, right Dean? And I’m a monster.”

“Sammy, I didn’t _say_ that,” Dean said. He tried to sound calm, keep his voice down and keep his breathing even. He tried not to look into his brother’s eyes and see the strange things flicking like wayward June bugs just behind his pupils. He wanted more than anything to be able to say, “No, Sammy, you’re not a monster,” and believe it. “Sam, let go of my hand,” he said instead.

Sam’s lips curved into a slow smile. “No,” he said, and the things in his eyes seemed to swarm in agitation. “Kill me. You want to. I see the way you look at me. Do it.”

“Sam… _let go_!” Dean snarled, pushing his face close to Sam’s, trying to make him back off.

“No, Dean,” Sam said, and his voice was calm. His grip over Dean’s hand around the hilt of the knife pressed to his own throat was strong and every time Dean tried to break it, it got stronger. “I’m tired. I don’t want to do the things I do, but I _hurt_ … so bad when I don’t. I can’t… I can feel everything changing.”

Dean’s eyes narrowed on Sam’s face. “Changing how?”

Sam made an amused sound almost like a laugh, but not quite. “Changing like… pretty soon I don’t think you’ll be wrong when you look at me the way you do. Changing like… like I’m not me anymore. Or not the same me.” Sam swallowed and dropped his eyes for a second. When he brought them back up, Dean had to clench his teeth not to jerk away. “I need you to do this for me, Dean.”

Dean stared back at him, watched the dark things writhing like maggots preparing to give birth to shadows behind Sam’s eyes and he thought about it. He considered it and his arm tensed against the hold Sam had on his hand. “No, Sam.”

“For God’s sake, _why_?” Sam asked. Such exasperation and desperation could only belong to Sam. No demon ever sounded like that when it was dying.

Dean thought about it and licked his dry lips. “God has nothing to do with it,” he said slowly. “If it were up to God… Hell, if it were about God, I’d do it, Sam. I’d kill you and walk away knowing I’d saved the world. But…” He swallowed and pressed his face closer to Sam’s, his mouth almost pressed to Sam’s cheek as he whispered. “I won’t kill you, Sammy, because I love you too much. And for the record, God can go fuck himself.”

Sam’s eyes closed briefly and he took a couple of deep breaths. His hold on Dean’s hand loosened and Dean started to pull away when it suddenly tightened again. “I don’t believe you,” Sam snapped, and his voice was brittle with accusation. “I’m not human anymore, Dean, if I ever was,” he said, pressing the tip of the knife to his own throat hard enough that a bead of bright red blood formed on the steel tip. “I know you. You don’t love the bad things, you hunt them. You said… if you didn’t know me, you would want to hunt me. I’m right here, Dean, what’s stopping you?”

“I already _told you_ ,” Dean snapped right back at him. His fist around the knife tightened in his sudden anger. “Sammy, we are _not_ doing this. We are not fucking talking about this shit. Let me go right now.”

“No,” Sam said, and he stood up, pulling Dean with him by his arm. “You’re going to do it. I want you to.”

“This may come as a big shock, little brother, but I don’t give a flying fuck what you want,” Dean said, shoving him back as he stood. “Now let go of my hand.”

Sam laughed. _Actually_ laughed. “Or you’ll do what?”

Gritting his teeth, Dean pulled his arm back, using his strength against Sam’s to force the knife away from Sam’s throat. “Let go,” he growled through his teeth.

“Oh, Dean,” Sam said, his tone almost pitying. “No.” He tightened his hold on Dean’s hand and put his own superior strength against Dean’s, slowly pulling the knife back to his throat until the edge of the blade rested firmly against his skin, the tip digging in.

“Goddamn it, Sam—”

“God doesn’t have anything to do with this, remember?” Sam said. “I’m sorry, Dean,” he said.

There was only a second after those words where Dean had a chance to wonder, then he felt Sam’s hand fall away and he knew but he had no chance to stop it. He had kept his arm tense as Sam drew the knife back to his throat, went on trying to pull it back as Sam pulled it forward again and when Sam let go, Dean’s hand jerked back to him and he stumbled.

When Sam let go, the knife sliced through his flesh like the blade of a heated sword through milk. The knife was so sharp in fact, that Dean stood there, eyes wide and waiting to see blood for a good ten seconds before it sprayed him.

~~*~~

When Sam wakes in the morning, Dean’s still sitting on the floor, staring blankly at a patch of carpet beneath the bed, gently rocking himself. Sam stretches and rolls onto his side to watch him, unsurprised by the sight. Mildly amused as he lets his eyes slide over Dean’s body.

“Dean?”

Dean’s eyes snap to Sam’s face, but he doesn’t stop rocking until Sam reaches a hand out to him across the bed and commands him closer with a beckoning jerk of his fingers. Then he stops and, watching his brother’s face warily, he gets up from the floor and goes to him.

“Morning, Sammy,” Dean murmurs. His voice sounds gravely and dry and his throat hurts like it’s been rubbed raw with salt after screaming. He licks his lips and swallows thickly as he sits on the edge of the bed beside Sam.

“Good morning,” Sam says softly back to him. Dean is sitting so that he is turned slightly away from him and Sam rests his forehead for a moment on the curve of his hip. He can feel the way the bone there presses against him under Dean’s skin and it makes him smile. He turns his face to it and nips lightly with his teeth as he sits up, moving closer to Dean just like that, an unfolding grace that draws him along Dean’s body. “What were you thinking?” he whispers in Dean’s ear.

Dean shivers at the rush of Sam’s breath along his skin and pulls his shoulder up at the sensation. “I can’t sleep,” Dean tells him. And that’s certainly true most of the time. “I wasn’t thinking anything, Sammy. I just couldn’t sleep.”

Sam’s lips curve against the side of Dean’s neck and Dean starts to tremble. When Sam slides an arm around his waist and pulls Dean farther onto the bed, moves over him until he’s fitted against Dean’s back, Dean’s breath catches. He’s afraid and he knows that Sam can smell it on him. It sickens him a little to know that’s probably a lot of the attraction.

“You could just as easily not sleep in the bed as you do on the floor you know,” Sam says.

God, how Dean wants to hate the touch of those hands, but like a dog he leans into it.

“Dean?” Sam asks.

“I know,” Dean says. “I just… I like the floor.”

Sam snorts out a scoffing sound and sits back a little. “Don’t lie,” he says. “Why don’t you like to sleep with me anymore?”

 _Don’t ask me that. Please, don’t ask me these things,_ Dean thinks with tired sadness. There is no lie that will satisfy these questions, no honest answer that will be enough. “You know why,” he says.

Sam leans over and lightly bites Dean’s earlobe. “No,” he says. “Tell me why. Tell me really.”

Dean lifts a shaking hand to run it through his hair and then just holds it over his eyes and sighs. “Because… I remember…”

Sam pushes a hand down Dean’s side, lightly stroking over his thigh. “What do you remember?”

“I remember you before,” Dean whispers. There is salt in his eyes and on the end of his tongue and somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders if he’s crying—or going to. “I remember you reaching out to touch me in the middle of the night.”

“Really?” Sam whispers against the back of Dean’s ear. His hand on his thigh is still lightly stroking, as though trying to soothe. As though such a thing ever could. “Then why are you so scared of me?”

Dean chokes out a laugh before he can stop it. It’s a sound made of part hysteria and part disbelief. “My god, Sam… what the hell kind of question is that?”

“A redundant one, I guess,” Sam says and abruptly lets Dean go to roll over and stand.

He pulls on pants and fastens them before he rounds the bed to kneel beside it and run a hand up Dean’s leg. Sam keeps the key to the manacle around Dean’s ankle on a chain around his neck. It’s a pretty key, intricately laced like an old skeleton key and Dean watches as Sam slips it into the lock and turns it. There is a light click as the cuff opens and then Sam is rubbing his ankle for him and Dean is wishing like hell that he didn’t like the feeling.

“I need a shower,” Dean tells him.

“Yes you do,” Sam says. He’s grinning when he stands and puts the key back around his neck. “You go first. I’ll make coffee.”

It’s so completely and horribly domestic that it has Dean’s stomach clenching with disgust. It’s so fucking _normal_. If you don’t think about why he needs that shower. If you forget what Sam has become. If you get rid of the keys, the cuffs, the spells and the lies, it’s perfectly fucking normal.

“Go on,” Sam says and playfully swats Dean’s leg as he turns to go into the kitchen.

Dean runs his hand over the side of his neck as he watches Sam leave. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember the way Sam’s voice sounded before Dean slit his throat. It’s like trying to remember the voice of a loved one that is long dead. It comes and it goes… but mostly, it goes.

Dean gets up and crosses the room to the bathroom. He catches sight of Sam at the counter in the kitchen through the doorway as he passes it and he pauses. He stands there and quietly watches Sam fill the filter with coffee grounds, inhaling the scent before he snaps the lid back on the container and returns it to the cupboard. _Domestic_ , he thinks, but his eyes settle on the raised, pinkened scar on Sam’s neck and he frowns. _Or maybe not._

Sensing Dean lingering there in the doorway, Sam starts to raise his head, but Dean drops his eyes and continues on to the bathroom before their eyes can lock. He remembers how he used to love Sammy’s eyes… and now all he can think when he looks into them is how much easier everything would be if he could make himself believe that it was just some creature wearing Sam’s skin like a suit. But he can’t because it isn’t and he’s Dean Winchester, demon slayer extraordinaire—well, _ex_ -demon slayer extraordinaire, but either way, he _knows_ what’s out there. There has never been a time in his life where he wished more that he did _not_ know some of the things that he knows, but he knows them and because he knows them, he _knows_ that the thing living inside of Sam is still Sam. That the changes happened like the yearly tick of aging, like the natural birth of a moth from its cocoon; nature’s way of tempering the steel so it won’t break the first time it hits something a little bigger than itself. It is Sam who holds him here, Sam who locks him to the bed, Sam who fucks him at night before he falls asleep and looks for him on the floor as he wakes each morning.

It would be easier if it were not, but it is.

Dean smells coffee and toasted bread when he gets out of the shower. He dries himself, taking his time with it, then pulls on jeans and goes out to breakfast like he’s going out to face a firing squad.

Dean stands in the doorway for a moment, again watching Sam as he moves around the kitchen, putting toast and eggs on plates, pouring coffee. He enters the kitchen, moving cautiously across the room to sit, sensing Sam’s eyes on him like the points of poisoned needles.

He picks up his coffee cup and sips. Two sugars, one cream; perfect.

 _I wish you made bad coffee, Sammy,_ he thinks, and yeah, he knows exactly how irrational that is given the situation. But it would make him feel a little better to have a spot of rust or dirt somewhere sometimes. Something out of place, something to mar this protective shield Sam’s created around him.

It’s something about Sam that’s not very… Sam-like. It’s a little too neurotic, a little too obsessive, a little too much of a lot of things that Sammy never really was any good at being. Dean misses that imperfection a lot these days. Sometimes he just wants to see mud tracks on the floor or dirty clothes thrown over the back of a chair.

He’d give just about anything for the smell of cheap motel room bed sheets.

“Thanks,” Dean says and sips his coffee again before setting it down.

“Welcome,” Sam says around a bite of toast. He sits down and nudges the butter toward Dean with his fingertips. “You need to eat. You’re getting thinner.”

“Yeah. It’s that obvious? You can see it?” Dean asks. He picks up a butter knife and spreads butter on a triangle of toast. He’s getting _thinner_. Maybe he’ll die. He ponders this as he watches the gleam of the steel knife spreading butter.

Butter knives don’t make very good weapons if your intent is to kill, not wound. Or get laughed at. It reminds him of all of his grade school teachers, the ones that told him not to run with scissors. Those little bright plastic scissors that couldn’t even cut through construction paper. He doesn’t know why it reminds him of that, but it does, and without realizing it, he’s smiling.

“And I can feel it,” Sam says. He notices Dean smiling and cocks his head. “Your bones are sharper these days.”

Dean’s smile disappears. “Oh,” he says, and eats his toast.

A few minutes later, as Dean’s eating the last of his scrambled eggs, Sam says, “I’m going out again today.”

What the hell does he want Dean to say to that? Does he expect Dean to be disappointed? Does he want him to ask him questions? _Should_ he ask him questions? Before… everything, before it all went to shit and Sam hit his metamorphic stride on the way to becoming a grown-up demon… Before, Dean probably would have asked hundreds of questions. Then he would have argued about it. He would have been mightily pissed off and given Sam a hundred different kinds of shit—one for every question.

“Okay,” Dean says. He puts his fork down, drinks the rest of his coffee, then gets up from the table and goes back into the bedroom.

He sits on his side of the bed with his elbows braced on his thighs, head down and waits for Sam to come chain him back up to it.

As he sits there, it crosses his mind that Sam isn’t the only one of them who’s changed. Like the ticking passage of time, Dean’s different now too.

“I didn’t mean right now, Dean,” Sam says, coming into the room. He stands there for a little while, just watching Dean sit there. With a sigh, he walks over to the bed and sits beside him. “I’m sorry it has to be like this,” he says, and leans down to pick up the cuff from the floor as he slips the key from around his neck.

Dean shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t say anything. He has a knife hidden in the mattress and there are others throughout the room, all within his reach if he wants them. Some of them, he’s sure Sam knows about. Others, he’s not so sure. But none of that matters because Sammy doesn’t worry about Dean trying to kill him; Sammy worries about Dean trying to _leave_ him.

Dean sits there with his eyes on the floor as Sam moves around the room getting dressed. He watches from the corners of his eyes as Sam slips a knife into a sheath at his back, another smaller one into his boot, a gun in a shoulder rig. He notes that one of the blades is tipped with silver, the other is crusted with dried salt water. His lips twitch as he thinks that none of that is going to matter worth a damn if Sam’s going out to hunt what Dean has come to believe he has been hunting.

“Do you want me to turn the radio on for you?” Sam asks. He stands anxiously next to the bed as he waits for Dean to answer.

“No, Sam,” Dean says. “I think I can do that myself just fine if I want it.” Lately, he really likes the quiet more, though. Sometimes. Sometimes he gets trapped in his own thoughts and he can’t stand it. Times like that, the blaring scream of something random from the radio can push it away.

Right now he wants quiet.

Oh, and one more thing. “Do you think you could take a break in your… demonic exploits and find the time to buy me a pack of cigarettes before you come home?”

Sam snorts laughter and slips his hand into his coat pocket to jangle his keys as he starts for the door. “I’ll do my best,” he promises.

Dean scowls at the carpet and nods. “Alright. See you later,” he says, thinking that even now, Sammy’s best is still pretty damn good.

~~*~~

In shock, Dean sat there holding Sam’s body as the light bled from the sky, feeling every single drop and smear of Sam’s blood congealing and cooling on his hands and in the threads of his clothes. He smoothed the hair back from Sam’s pale face and watched in stunned confusion the way his fingers left lines and prints of red on his skin.

“What happened here?”

Dean looked up, unsurprised to see Castiel standing there looking like a ragged stock-broker formed of shadow and light. _God’s got a really childish sense of humor_ , he thought, not for the first time. “Don’t ask me that like you don’t already know,” he whispered.

“You killed him,” Castiel said. It wasn’t an accusation, but Dean tensed defensively anyway and leaned more over Sam, as though protecting _him_ from the truth of those words.

“I didn’t… I…” Dean huffed out a breath and shook his head. “I’m still not sure what the fuck actually happened,” he said. “He… made me. And that is not an excuse, man. He fucking… he held it to his own throat and…”

“That was noble of him,” Castiel said.

Dean bared his teeth at the angel and jabbed a finger at him. “Do _not_ … This is not amusing or funny or… Just shut the hell up.”

“I was not being facetious,” Castiel said. He crossed the short distance to one of the motel beds and sat down. “He had to die. There was, ultimately, no other way.”

“That’s great and all,” Dean whispered, looking back down at Sam’s face. His jaw clenched. “I’m sure wherever the _hell_ he is, he’s glad to know that he’s… served his higher fucking purpose… Look, I thought I told you to shut the fuck up.”

“Hell, actually,” Castiel corrected. Dean glared at him and he blinked back calmly. “Look at him. What he became… is regrettable. And inevitable, just as this was.”

“He is not your fucking _sacrifice_ ,” Dean snapped.

“Not mine, no,” Castiel said. “I am only a messenger in a vessel, remember?”

“You’re not God, right,” Dean muttered.

“But God can go fuck himself, isn’t that right?” Castiel said calmly.

Dean carefully moved Sam off of his lap and laid him back on the bed across from Castiel. As he stood, he turned a hateful look on the angel and wiped his bloody hands on the thighs of his jeans. “I don’t see any demons waltzing around demanding I sacrifice… After _everything_ we’ve done. Every exorcism, every death, every time we saved someone’s motherfucking cat from a tree!” Dean took a deep breath to give himself time to get a little bit of his control back. “Everything we’ve done and everything we’ve lost… that has to count for _something_.”

“It does,” Castiel said simply. “But this is bigger than you, bigger than what you’ve done and what you’ve lost. A _world_ now hinges on the things you do, so yes, it counts for something. It just doesn’t get you a… get out of jail free card.”

“Then what the fuck does it get me, huh?” Dean demanded, taking a step toward him.

Castiel watched him, saw the way his hands were fisted in anger, eyes wide and darkened with rage, and the way he made himself stop. He smiled faintly. “You get what everyone gets.”

“And what the fuck is that, exactly?” Dean asked.

“A lifetime,” Castiel said. The words themselves were simple but the way he said them implied infinitely more than only that.

“He _tried_ not to… become this,” Dean said, turning away from Castiel. He couldn’t look at him anymore right now or he was going to do something really stupid. “You knew this would happen,” he accused.

“No,” Castiel said. “But I’m not surprised by it. Your brother was tormented.”

“And why couldn’t he just not…? It was like he had no choice,” Dean said.

“Maybe he didn’t,” Castiel said.

“What the fuck ever happened to free will?” Dean said, finally turning back to face him. “Don’t we get that? Free will, like… say no to drugs, abstinence until marriage, don’t use your wacky hoodoo demon powers if you don’t fucking _want_ to? You know, free will.”

“I am aware of the concept,” Castiel said dryly. He shifted a little on the bed and Dean tensed, thinking he was going to stand, but Castiel only rested his hands in his lap and regarded him patiently. “You must understand, we see all that you do. In many ways we know you, both individually and as a species, better than you know yourselves. We have had many thousands of years to watch you.” His lips twitched a little in amusement. “You are a rather predictable race. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have free will.”

“What good is it then? Free will if it’s only to do what you already know we’re going to do?” Dean demanded.

He looked down at Sam again, his hand lifting to reach out and touch him before he resisted the urge. He could sit there and pet Sammy’s corpse all night long, but it wouldn’t get Dean one second closer to getting him back, so he let his hand drop back to his side. Castiel would probably say that too was free will. “This… isn’t fair,” he said.

A sharp bark of involuntary laughter had Dean’s head coming up and his eyes going wide. He’d never heard the angel laugh before. Until it happened, he’d kind of thought Castiel wasn’t really capable of it. “What?”

Castiel shook his head and waved it away, his lips still curved in a little smile of amusement. “Nothing. It’s just… sometimes I forget how innocent you can be.”

“Me?” Dean said incredulously. “Dude, I am _not_ innocent. I thought you knew everything. Apparently Great Granddaddy High and Mighty was keeping the good shit all to himself then because—”

“You mistake my meaning,” Castiel said. He wasn’t smiling anymore but his eyes held in them an amused knowledge that made Dean fall silent. Like maybe he knew what Dean looked like naked or something. “Humanity. You are innocent. How could you not be? You live so short a time. That is what I meant.”

Dean sat back down in the chair he’d been holding Sam in when Castiel came in. Or appeared. Or whatever it was the guy did that looked like falling through water out of the shadows where one minute he wasn’t there and the next, he was. He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was getting a headache. Actually, he suspected he’d had one for quite a while and was just beginning to notice it.

“Imagine, if you can,” Castiel said, “that life _was_ fair and everyone got precisely what they deserved. That would mean that you deserve all of the horrible things that happen to you as much as the good ones. It would mean that in some way… somewhere, sometime, you were a really terrible person. Of course it is not _fair_. That’s what Heaven and Hell are for.”

“Great,” Dean said, drawing the word out with a tired sigh. “That’s great. Makes me take all kinds of comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

“I am not here to comfort you,” Castiel said. “You’re the one who brought free will into it.” His tone was almost hostile and Dean could see the way his lip wanted to curl. It wasn’t the first time Dean had gotten the impression that the angel didn’t much like human beings as a general rule.

Dean felt in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. “Then why the fuck are you here?”

“Because I’m supposed to be,” Castiel said.

“Uh-huh,” Dean said. He found his cigarettes. The pack was a little crushed, but the cigarettes were basically okay and completely smokable. He lit one with a Bic lighter and exhaled smoke in Castiel’s direction. “Free will again, right?” he said, voice fairly dripping with sarcasm.

Castiel sat forward with his elbows on his knees and looked directly into Dean’s eyes. Dean shifted uncomfortably at the deep knowledge that stared back at him. Deep knowledge, not all of which was very friendly. He thought of the first time he’d met the angel, the way those same eyes had looked at him and damned him even as Castiel asked for his help.

“No one asked you to fight. No one,” Castiel said. “You could have turned your back on what you knew, married, had children, bought your kids a dog for Christmas and sold life insurance. You say ‘free will’ like those two words are capitalized and grant you some kind of diplomatic immunity, but they don’t mean what you think they mean. No one asked you to do anything. Especially not God. _That_ is what free will means.”

Dean nodded thoughtfully and smoked the rest of his cigarette. Sam’s body laying there on the bed, cold and hardening with rigor was in the peripheral of his vision and it drew Dean’s gaze again and again. He knew that Castiel was watching him and remembered thinking that the angel looked at him like someone who knows what you look like naked. He chuffed soft, unamused laughter, thinking what else he had to know if he knew that.

“I love him,” he whispered, saying it like was a confession. Hell, he was telling an angel of God that he was _in love with_ his own little brother and that was before you factored in all the demonic blood bullshit. It was his dirtiest little secret and telling it to Castiel felt a little like getting caught by a priest while pissing in the confessional. “You know that, though, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“You damn me for it,” Dean said. “I’ve seen it… in your eyes.”

“Damning you is not part of my job, Dean,” Castiel said. He sighed and sat back, his hands once again in his lap like he didn’t really know what to do with them. “To love is… We don’t love. Most of us don’t. The fallen… It’s one of humanity’s graces, I think. And to love is never evil.”

Dean finished his cigarette and used the butt to light another one before it burned completely to the filter. He caught Castiel watching him as he crushed it out on the heel of his boot and lifted a brow. “What?”

“Does that help?” Castiel asked, gesturing to the cigarette in Dean’s right hand.

Dean held it in front of his face, tip up, and considered it. “No,” he said, returning it to his mouth for another drag. “You want one?”

Castiel shook his head and stood. He didn’t move to leave and he didn’t disappear, so Dean waited for him to say whatever the fuck he had to say so he could go. “It’s not evil… I just wish you hadn’t loved _this_ one,” he said. “If it ends… I think maybe it will end with love.”

“What, the world?” Dean asked.

Castiel shrugged.

Annoyed, Dean stood up and grabbed his coat. He felt for his keys in the pocket as he started toward the door. “Whatever, be cryptic then,” he said. “You let yourself in, you can let yourself out.”

“Where are you going?” Castiel asked.

“Hey man, I’m the predictable one here, remember?” Dean said. He locked gazes with Castiel as he turned to close the door behind himself and paused. “You really want to know? Alright, fine. I’m gonna find the nearest demon that’ll deal with me for _him_. How’s that for free will, asshole? Put that in your trumpet and toot it.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing the angel’s stolen eyes widen in surprise before he closed the door on him and walked to his car.

~~*~~

It’s getting dark when Sam finally comes home. Dean is sitting in the middle of the bed, half-asleep and half near-comatose meditation.

He’s watched the roses in the pot by they bay window climb the walls and ceiling for most of the day. They chase the shadows that watch him from the corners with their white-red eyes. Sometime around one he took a break from that to relieve himself in the flowerpot, but then he went back to the bed to doze. He turned on the radio for a little while, but he didn’t like it and immediately turned it off. He’s been mumble-humming “I Wanna Be Your Dog” under his breath and rocking himself for the last hour, and he’s watching the sun turn orange as it descends when he hears the metallic click and slide of Sam’s key in the door.

Dean looks up, head cocked as he watches the door swing open. Sam walks in looking tired, drawn and very dirty. He doesn’t look defeated exactly, but he does look frustrated, which tells Dean right away that his hunt was once again an unsuccessful one.

Sam walks over to the bed and puts out a hand to stroke it through Dean’s hair, over his head to the back of his neck where he lightly pinches in a massaging way. As he takes his hand away, Dean sees the maroon black flakes of dried blood under his short fingernails and blinks. Maybe not completely unsuccessful after all.

“Hey,” Sam says. He takes his coat off and tosses it over the back of a chair in the corner by the door. It won’t be there for long, Dean knows. He looks at it laying there now while he still can. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing,” Dean says, and he’s not lying. Not really. “But you should know that. What did _you_ do today, Sammy?”

Sam lays his knives down on the table on his side of the bed and then takes off the shoulder holster before he sits down on the edge of the mattress. “I don’t want to talk about that, Dean,” he says as he plucks at the double knot in the laces of one of his boots.

Dean gets up from the bed and goes to stand by the window and look out at the city while Sam undresses. He watches the slate grey of the sky turn darker and darker, rapidly going to black now that the sun has set. The darker it gets, the more mirror-like the window becomes until Dean’s watching Sam pull his shirt over his head in the reflective surface.

A phantom movement from the corner of his eye makes Dean turn his head to look at the rose bush beside him. The flowers are wide open and a pink so dark that it is almost red, but not quite. Wild roses—because Sam put them out on the balcony and they froze.

Sam likes roses, he once told Dean, because they can’t help being what they really are. Domesticated roses like you buy at flower stands are beautiful, like intricate and finely folded paper. Like some kind of paper art. But they all come from wild roses and when they freeze, the next year when they grow back, they’ll be wild roses again.

Watching Sam in the mirror-window again, Dean thinks there should probably be a deep and meaningful metaphor in there somewhere, but he’s kind of tired and a little nervous. He can’t really be bothered with shit like metaphors when Sam’s around.

“Dean,” Sam says.

Dean looks at him in the reflection in the window. “What, Sam?”

Sam sits back down on the side of the bed and puts out a hand. He’s still wearing his jeans, but they’re unfastened and that’s all he’s wearing. That and the key around his neck. “Come here,” he says, and it is not a request.

A cold shiver runs through Dean at the heavy fall of those words; the command in them. There was a time not that long ago when he wouldn’t have, but he obeys it and goes to him. The chain cuffed to his ankle slides over the carpet as Dean goes to stand in front of Sam and takes his hand, linking their fingers.

“Sit here,” Sam says. He puts his hand on the bed beside him and Dean sits while Sam takes the key from around his neck and leans down to unlock the cuff and remove it.

When it’s off, Dean sits there rubbing the spot where the metal rubbed all day and deliberately does _not_ look up as Sam stands to take his pants off. He sees him from the peripheral of his vision as Sam walks around the room, picking up his clothes and putting them in the hamper, hanging his coat in the closet. He hums softly to himself as he listens to the water running in the bathroom sink where Sam’s washing his face.

Dean feels Sam’s hand on his head, fingers sliding through his hair, and lets his head fall back. He looks into Sam’s face and frowns a little. “You still smell like sulfur,” he whispers.

Sam raises an eyebrow at that, still petting his fingers through Dean’s hair and over the back of his neck. “Maybe in your head that’s what I smell like,” he says. He leans down and licks Dean’s mouth, a quick flick of his tongue like a snake scenting him, then catches his bottom lip between his teeth and tugs lightly. Dean starts to lie back on the bed, yielding to what Sam wants even if he’s not entirely willing, but Sam hooks his fingers in the front of his jeans and pulls him back. “Take them off,” he says.

Dean swallows around his quickening pulse and nods. Sam lets him go and stands back to watch him and Dean can’t quite keep his hands from shaking as he fumbles his pants open.

“You’re always nervous, like it’s the first time,” Sam says, amused. He reaches out and grabs Dean’s hip, his fingers digging in as he pulls Dean against him.

Dean feels his skin pressed against the bones Sam told him he could feel so sharply, how it slides painfully in a way that says he’ll have fingerprint bruises later. Sam’s breath is warm on his neck then his teeth are against it, lightly biting. Dean shivers and lets out a shaky breath as he turns his head to the side so Sam can get to the spot. The bites are soothed by licking, but Sam’s growling against his ear and Dean’s skin prickles with goosebumps at the sound.

“I scare you this badly?” Sam whispers in his ear. “Without doing anything at all, you’re this afraid of me?”

“More,” Dean admits. “This is what it looks like when I’m trying to hide it.”

Sam’s laughter is a deep, rolling chuckle that hums against Dean’s skin and makes him tense. “Get on the bed,” he says.

Holding his gaze, though it makes his skin crawl like ants are marching on it, Dean backs up to the bed until his thighs bump the edge of the mattress. Sam follows him there, his body never far enough away that Dean escapes its warmth, his eyes moving over Dean’s body like the edge of a knife.

“You had a scar here,” Sam whispers, and reaches out to run his thumb over a place over Dean’s hip, just below his belly. There is a sudden shock of cold pain under Sam’s hand and Dean can _feel_ the wound. He can smell his own blood mixed with the scent of gunpowder as the cold shock slips away and becomes a deep, agonizing heat. “Do you remember it?” Sam asks him.

He pushes Dean back on the bed and Dean feels Sam’s mouth on his as the scream builds in his throat. Strained sounds of pain escape as whimpers as Sam presses his thumb deep into his flesh and then suddenly releases him. Sam licks his mouth and Dean falls back on the bed panting.

“Do you remember?” Sam asks again.

Dean shakes his head and Sam reaches for him again. With a little cry of fear, Dean scrambles away from him until his back’s pressed into the wrought iron headboard of the bed. “Don’t,” he hisses at Sam. “I remember, okay, Sammy? Don’t… please don’t do it again, I—”

Sam strokes down Dean’s sides and there is only warm pleasure in the touch. “Shh,” Sam soothes, lowering himself on the bed to press kisses along the place where he’d touched. He licks a little and trails his kisses up Dean’s belly, over his chest.

“And you wonder why I’m afraid of you,” Dean says. He’s still breathing hard, but he’s beginning to relax again. The more Sam touches him like that, the more he likes it, the more willing he is, the more he hates himself for letting his brother make a pet out of him.

“Dean… we had the same father. We hunted the same monsters,” Sam says. As he speaks, he flicks his tongue over a nipple, making Dean twitch. “I’ve been where you’ve been. I don’t wonder why you’re afraid of me.”

“You have _not_ been where I’ve been,” Dean snaps before he can think not to.

Sam raises his head and looks at him. Dean waits for him to say something; to argue with him about it or hit him. Maybe chain him back to the bed and go sleep in one of the rooms down the hall. The waiting almost hurts as much as Sam’s thumb over his old, healed wound.

“Turn around,” Sam says. Dean blinks at him, a little surprised, and Sam smiles back. “Turn around and grab the headboard.”

Dean slowly gets up on his knees, fear and want a deep beating thing inside him that makes his breath harsher and his pulse thrum against the back of his tongue. Sam doesn’t lean away as he gets up, so he’s forced to move against him to turn around and by the time he reaches out for the headboard, he’s panting, drawing in Sam’s sulfur scent with every inhalation.

“Wrap your fingers around the vines,” Sam says softly in his ear. He reaches up to put his hands over Dean’s and closes them around the metal which is shaped in whirls of rose vines. The sharp little iron thorns slip between his fingers and as Dean watches, they reach out like tentacles and close around his fingers, holding him there.

“Sam?” Dean says, a note of alarm creeping into his voice as he tries to take his hands off the bar of the headboard, but can’t. He has iron wrapped tightly around each finger like the rings of some strange torture device and he can’t get away. He tries to anyway and struggles back against Sam, who’s right behind him, pressed close to his back. “Sam, what is this? Sam, let me _go_!”

Sam smiles against the back of Dean’s neck and smoothes his hands down his sides, fingers ticking along his ribs to his hips, where Sam grabs him and pulls him back. Dean’s arms shake slightly and he grips the bar of the headboard as Sam pulls Dean’s hips back, stretching him out until his arms are over his head and he has to drop his head between his shoulders and stare at the bed to relieve the tension in his shoulders.

Sam licks along Dean’s spine, tonguing each vertebra as he moves down his body. His fingers press deep into Dean’s skin over his hips, his hold tightening and relaxing like the kneading paws of a kitten, and the lower he goes, the quicker Dean’s breath gets until he’s making soft sounds that are like whimpers broken by gasps.

“Spread your legs,” Sam says. Dean trembles and shakes his head. “I can spread them for you,” Sam whispers, his voice sliding up Dean’s back as he licks back up his spine to his shoulders. “I want you to do it.”

He wanted an invitation? Dean feels an absurd pang of amusement at the idea. “Sam, I…”

“Do you want me to stop?” Sam asks and Dean can feel every warm inch of his skin pressed against his back. He can feel his sweat and Sam’s against his back and the way Sam’s breathing presses his chest more firmly to his back. He can feel his heart beating there and smell Sam’s skin. He smells like myrrh and apple blossoms. And he had asked because no matter what Dean’s contract says, Sam will not rape him.

Dean shakes his head. “No.”

Sam runs one hand over the small of Dean’s back, down the curve of his ass, and nuzzles into the hair beside his ear. “Then I am not asking,” Sam says. “Spread your legs.”

Dean huffs out a breath and grips the iron bar of the headboard tightly as he shifts his weight to do what Sam wants. “Sam…”

“What?” Sam asks.

“Put your arm around my waist,” Dean says.

Sam does it and with some of the tension taken off of his back, Dean moves around and opens his legs. Sam’s hand around his waist tightens and his other hand presses down Dean’s back, palm sliding to cup as his fingers spread over Dean’s ass. There is something cold moving on his back between his shoulders and it takes Dean a minute to think of what it could be. Then he remembers the key Sam wears around his neck and feels a stab of some emotion that is almost anger. He can’t imagine how he forgot it. He’s felt it sliding over his skin enough times before; he should have its shape branded in his mind.

Sam presses a finger inside his ass and Dean’s not expecting it so he cries out. Sam laughs softly and works his finger past the tightening of Dean’s body, making low, murmuring sounds of comfort in his throat as he adds a second finger and spreads them. Dean jerks against him and cries out at the pain of it. Sam is not being gentle and with no lubrication whatsoever, even this much hurts.

Sam’s soft laughter in his ear sends a shock of unwanted desire straight to his belly and Dean moans. “Sam… you’re hurting me,” Dean whispers.

“I know,” Sam says. He turns his face to rub his cheek over the place between Dean’s shoulders. He hasn’t shaved since morning so his stubble tickles and scrapes Dean’s skin. “I wanted to.”

Dean makes a low sound of negation in his throat and tries to turn around, but he can’t. The bed holds him and Sam smacks a hand to the middle of his back and makes him stay. Sam… _Sam_ didn’t like to hurt people. He didn’t like to see them hurt. Most of all, Sam didn’t like to see Dean hurt. Hell, most of the time, if they fought, Sam wouldn’t even hit him back. _Say you’re sorry, Sammy,_ Dean silently begs him. _Sam_ would say he was sorry. Even if he liked it, he would apologize.

Sam doesn’t say anything. He moves against Dean’s back and pulls his fingers back, then shoves them inside him again. Dean catches his breath, then almost screams as the fingers inside him seem to elongate and change, become smoother and rougher at the same time. It’s almost… like two little flicking cat tongues. It doesn’t feel bad—it actually feels really fantastic—but it also freaks him the hell out because shit like that just doesn’t happen without mechanical intervention.

Then Sam’s fingers are gone and Dean’s body feels like it is humming. He moans and pushes back against Sam, wanting him so badly he aches, but not wanting to ask for it.

He doesn’t need to ask. Sam murmurs something in his ear that sounds like, “I won’t hurt you anymore,” and though Dean doesn’t know if he completely believes that, there’s a part of him that just doesn’t care right now.

The key slides over the back of Dean’s neck as Sam pushes his cock inside him. It’s like the last nail in a coffin, Dean thinks vaguely. He laughs, but it’s lost in a moan as Sam pushes in, then snaps his hips to thrust fully inside him. They stay like that for a few minutes, Dean moaning and whimpering as his body adjusts, as he makes himself relax, makes himself _not_ think about demons riding him and how much more considerate Sam is about it than the rest of them.

Sam pulls back a little and thrusts, his cock sliding over Dean’s prostate, sending shocks of deep, thick pleasure though him, causing tightening sensations in his belly. He wonders, not for the first time, if Sammy can read his mind.

Sam nips his shoulder lightly and thrusts again, grinding his hips against Dean’s ass to work his cock over the spot. Dean turns his face to the side, resting his cheek on his arm and his cries turn to sounds like sobs as Sam takes a slow, deep rhythm and fucks him like he means to go on doing it forever. He builds it up, bringing Dean close enough to orgasm that he tenses in readiness, only to take it away and start it all over again.

Dean isn’t sure when the bands of iron slipped from his fingers but he finds himself shoved down on the bed, hands twisted in miles of cold, white sheets with Sam’s heat burning against his back. Sam’s fingers drag down his sides and Dean can feel the way his skin pulls under his hands like the pelt of a cat.

“Can you feel the sands of time running through your fingers?” Sam murmurs in Dean’s ear.

Dean cries out and turns his head, twisting around to find Sam’s mouth and kiss him. He catches his lips with teeth and tongue and then shoves his mouth down on Sam’s as pleasure slices like a diamond crusted edge through his body. It feels good—he’d be lying to say that it doesn’t—but it also hurts really goddamn bad. It’s like being pulled inside out over a sandpaper bed of broken glass, like being shot by a bullet that brings you screaming toward climax; pleasure that feels like it should kill.

Dean opens his eyes and his fingers sink into the bed. Except the bed isn’t a bed anymore, it is dry prismatic dunes of the finest, whitest sand Dean’s ever seen. Sand so fine that it’s like thick, liquid silt, and so bright that the sun hitting it reflects rainbows into his eyes that dance along his skin. Sam’s stomach pushes against the small of Dean’s back and his fingers dig into his hips. His breath is harsh in Dean’s ears and every deep thrust within him rips a cry from his throat that burns. It’s too much; the sand, the heat, the rainbows, Sam, Sam, Sam _everywhere_.

_Can you feel the sands of time running through your fingers?_

“Yes,” Dean manages. He nudges Sam’s shoulder and arm with his nose, nipping lightly with his teeth as the sensations overwhelming him become too much to bear in peace. He can actually feel the tiny grains under his fingernails and stuck in the sweat along his sides. He can feel the way it grinds against his skin, trapped between Sam’s rough hands and his flesh. “I feel it,” he hisses at Sam and bites his upper arm as he clenches his hands in the sand.

Sam’s touch gentles and his hands stroke and pet where they had only grabbed and held before. He pushes his palms down Dean’s hips and rests them on top of his thighs as he moves, still slow and deep, but now moving with a consummate determination he had not had before. And just like that, the pain in the pleasure slips away like a sloughed skin and Dean moans around the flesh between his teeth before letting go. He licks the place where he bit and watches the rapid way the skin melts in on itself until the blood he drew from Sam’s arm is beaded there on flawless, unmarked flesh.

Dean pushes back against Sam and tilts his head back as they move together. There is sun here and it doesn’t occur to him to wonder how, he just wants to feel it red like a tropical winter against his eyelids while Sam fucks him. He closes his eyes and nothing changes. He has no eyelids and the sun-washed brightness of the sand-rainbows dazzle his eyes, so he tries to turn his face away, but it’s everywhere.

“Sam,” he whimpers, turning to seek him out over his shoulder. Sam’s there and he licks Dean’s mouth with a soft, inquiring sound. “Make it stop,” Dean asks, whispering it as he licks Sam back. One of his hands goes to his thigh to link his fingers with Sam’s and he tugs at it. “Please, make it go away.”

Sam smiles against the corner of Dean’s mouth then he reaches up to put his hand to Dean’s cheek and turn his face away. “Put your head down,” Sam tells him.

Dean does it, ducking his head and closing his eyes. Through eyelids that are not there, he watches the shadows reach out from the hollow places and dunes in the sand and consume the sunlight. As the light bleeds away, it takes the prism sand with it. Dean blinks and his eyes close on darkness. When they open, he’s only got a white sheet gripped in his hands.

Sam’s hand strokes down Dean’s spine from neck to tailbone and his orgasm slips through him like warm clawed fingers. He wonders if he really feels grit on Sam’s fingertips and he _knows_ that the cold thing sliding through the sweat on his shoulder like a tiny paintbrush in ink is the tip of the key, but then he’s scrambling at the covers, pulling the sheet up to his face to muffle it as he screams. When he comes, it’s like a wash of saltwater on skin that’s been laid bare. Sam strokes and pets him as he trembles and shakes his way through it and Dean finds himself oddly comforted.

Sam’s movements slow to gentle little rocking thrusts. He barely withdraws at all, just pets Dean’s sides and licks at his sweat as he rocks them until the tightening contractions of Dean’s body make him come. Dean feels it inside him like the slick of wet fingers and moans, rocking back against Sam as he gasps and shakes. He finds himself oddly pleased by Sam’s pleasure and relaxes on the bed with a sigh as he recalls how it used to not be like this. He didn’t always think it was odd.

~~*~~

Dean found a demon shooting whiskey in a bar three streets over from the motel. He said his name was Pascal and though Dean didn’t believe him, he was greedy enough to make the kind of deal Dean wanted. For a price, though. There was always a price… but this time, more than just Dean’s eternal soul was at stake.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Dean said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand as he looked the demon over. He knew that the thing within and the body it was inhabiting didn’t really go together, but the body wasn’t all that bad if one could overlook the shine of hellfire in the eyes of the soul. Still, to be at the mercy of a demon in that way, a creature that by its very definition did not have any mercy to spare had Dean hesitating. “I don’t… Why _this_?”

Pascal grinned, flashing white teeth with very pointy canines. “Because I would _love_ to see you, Dean Winchester, on your knees and begging. Any way I can get it.” He leaned across the table, one hand holding a shot glass of red-gold liquid, the other flat on the tabletop, fingers squeaking on the battered varnish of the wood. “You _will_ beg me. I would lay down money that you beg very prettily, too, don’t you?”

“I…” Dean swallowed and shrank back from him. “I don’t know,” he blurted. He snatched up his beer and drank both to give himself more time to think and so he wouldn’t say anything else that stupid.

Pascal tapped his index finger on the side of the little glass in his hand. His fingernails were dense and sharp looking, like polished chunks of bottle glass, so it made a soft crystal _ping_ when he did it. “Perhaps I’ll just ask your brother, then.” The demon smiled again and threw his head back, downing the shot of whiskey with a satisfied sigh. “Unless of course, you’re having second thoughts?”

Hell yes he was having second thoughts. Second and third and fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ad infinitum. “Look, ask for something else,” Dean said. “There’s got to be something.”

“Like your eternal soul?” Pascal said, regarding him with raised eyebrows as he poured himself another shot.

“Yeah, I guess,” Dean said. He wasn’t too keen on that idea either, but he didn’t figure the demon was going to take an IOU, so he had to give him something. When it got right down to it, what good was his eternal soul to him, anyway? You couldn’t eat it, you couldn’t build a house with it, you couldn’t shoot anything with it, get drunk on it or wipe your ass with it. All you could really do with it was sell it. “Isn’t that what you guys usually ask for with this kind of shit anyway?”

Pascal drank his shot, then sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers on the table before him. “Yeah, well, think of a soul like a car,” he said. “Once it’s been bought and paid for and driven off the lot, it decreases in value. You follow?”

“Not really,” Dean said. “This is a metaphor isn’t it?”

“Precisely,” Pascal said. “Now _your_ soul, for example, is kind of like that little red Corvette that people dream about some day owning. It’s sleek and shiny, it can go from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye, the way it purrs would uncross the legs of a nun, _but_ … I just can’t afford the insurance so instead of doing any of those things, it just sits in the garage and gathers dust. Still with me?”

“I think you lost me with the nun,” Dean said.

“Alright, well imagine that little red Corvette was stolen,” Pascal said. “If I bought it, I’d be in some shit. Black-listed from all the best parties if nothing else. That’s you, so your soul’s great, but I’m gonna need a little bit more than that to actually take it, you understand?”

Dean thought about it, then shook his head. He had to get Sam back and he knew there was going to be a price and it wasn’t going to be something he _wanted_ to do. That was, after all, the meaning of sacrifice, wasn’t it?

One of Pascal’s hands reached across the table and his fingers slid like ghostly slugs down Dean’s arm. He imagined those hands touching him in other places, in other ways and it took everything he had not to jerk his arm away from the demon. He _really_ did not want to do this. “Why are you really doing this?”

“You want another reason?” Pascal said. “I’ve got a few more. How about because… _things_ are coming to a head, so to speak. We could really use your brother on our side. That’s not me being noble, mind you. I just know it won’t cost me a lot to get him back because they don’t really want to keep him down there—and then I get you.”

Dean stared down at the tabletop, watched his fingers as he turned his beer bottle in his hands. “I love him,” he whispered.

“I know. It’s sweet,” Pascal said, stroking his fingers down the back of Dean’s hand.

“You’re using it against me, though,” Dean said, looking up and locking eyes with the demon. “I hate you, you know.”

“Even better,” Pascal said, hissing it as he leaned toward Dean again. His hungry eyes glowed like the eyes of a cat. “You’re asking favors of a _demon_ , Winchester, remember? Whatever works, of course I’m using it against you. So what’ll it be?”

“There’s an angel watching me who won’t like it,” Dean told him, forgetting for the moment that Castiel wasn’t the nice kind of angel and how he’d rubbed it all in his face. “He might… do something.”

“Do you think so?” Pascal asked. He didn’t sound at all surprised. He grinned knowingly and leaned in close enough to Dean that his breath ruffled the hair by his ear. “I’ll tell you a secret if you want to hear it, Winchester.”

Dean jerked his head back with a nod.

“I’m not afraid of angels,” Pascal said and sat back down. His eyes moved to Dean’s hands where he was fiddling with his beer bottle and he licked his lips. “Do we have a deal?”

Dean still hesitated. Everything in him balked at the idea of what he was considering. It went against everything he knew, everything he’d been taught, everything he _was_. He’d asked Castiel about free will and now he believed he had a better grasp of the concept and what free will actually meant, yet still here he was, about to sell his soul and the last shreds of honor and nobility he had left to a demon who wouldn’t even give him his true name. But if he didn’t, he would lose Sam, probably forever.

We are told that we have a choice, but do we ever really?

“Yes,” Dean said, choking on the word as it left his mouth. He tasted bile on the back of his tongue and lifted his beer to wash it away, but Pascal caught his hand as he raised it and Dean felt the smooth bottle cut his fingertips. “Shit,” Dean hissed, and dropped the beer bottle. It hit the tabletop with a heavy _thunk_ , tipped over and rolled off the side of the table. He distantly heard the small crash of glass on the concrete floor, but he didn’t look.

Dean watched the dark liquid flow of his blood as it ran down his fingers and over Pascal’s wrist. He sat still as a mouse before the mesmerizing gaze of serpent as the demon leaned over the table and ran his tongue over the pads of Dean’s cut fingers. Pascal watched him and just before he let Dean go, he drew his middle finger suggestively into his mouth to suck it.

Dean snatched his hand away and glared at him. “What the fuck was that?”

Pascal laughed, the sound rolling over Dean’s skin like the brush of cold fur, and pushed back from the table. “An agreement,” Pascal said, pulling on his long coat. “Set in blood so it cannot be broken. Now, you wait for me here. I won’t be more than a few minutes.”

“That fast, huh?” Dean said, his heart racing as he thought about what he’d just done. “Don’t you have to… I don’t know, barter and shit?”

“I told you, they don’t really want him down there,” Pascal said. He smiled and his teeth gleamed in the dim barroom light. “Who knows? Maybe someone down there counted on you doing exactly this.”

~~*~~

The shadows on the wall are watching Dean as he lays there in the bed with Sam. He watches them back, the way they stalk like caged things through the room, and listens to the silence. He can feel the way Sam’s chest moves against his back with his breathing, the _thump, thump_ of his steady heart and it calms him.

Dean shifts, moving against Sam to get closer as the cool air in the room sends a chill over his body. Sam’s arm tightens around his waist and he nuzzles the back of Dean’s neck. “I see every day how your mind is breaking,” Sam whispers in his ear.

Dean takes a deep breath, holds it and lets it out. “Do you?” he says. “ _How_ is it breaking, Sam?”

Sam smiles against his skin. “By degrees,” he says.

Dean sighs and closes his eyes as a deep sadness washes over him. He thinks about what he’s lost. Always, it seems, he’s thinking about what he’s lost and counting the cost. The cost that sometimes feels so much greater than the value of the prize.

He has a knife hidden away that he is pretty sure Sam knows nothing about and he’s been thinking about it more and more. About what that means and all the possibilities. He wonders if Sam knows what he’s thinking and recalls the way he sometimes looks at Dean like he’s listening to something. He snuggles back against Sam’s warmth and thinks about the key his brother wears around his neck and how much he hates it and how, if Sam _can_ hear what he’s thinking, then he already knows about the knife.

It’s like a circle. Or a tangled web.

_What a tangled web we weave… something, something, to deceive…_

Whatever. Anyway, he remembers the basic idea, which is that once you start lying you can’t stop and it grows. Dean has never really been any good at all that deep and meaningful literary crap. He’s better at remembering the meaning than the words.

“What are you thinking?” Sam asks him.

Dean opens his eyes in the dark and stares out at the city beyond the bay window. “You still have to ask?”

Instead of answering, Sam pulls him closer and buries his face in the side of Dean’s neck like a dog scenting. Like he’s trying to memorize the smell of him.

“I was thinking that I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” Dean whispers. “That maybe it doesn’t _have_ to be, it just _is_. Maybe because it’s easier, I don’t know. But I was thinking… how maybe my mind is fucking breaking—hell, maybe it’s already gone—but the longer it’s like this, the less like us we are. You know? Like… we let it get to this because it was the only way. But what if… what if the only way we can have this means we aren’t _us_ anymore, Sam? Like… you’re not you. Not the you… you used to be. And I’m… God, I’m not me. I know I’m not. Does any of this make sense at all?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I think you just made my eyes cross a little, but yeah. It makes sense.”

Dean’s own laughter startles him and he jumps. “God,” he says with a sigh, relaxing more against Sam. “You almost sounded like yourself for a second there, Sammy.”

Sam laughs softly and nuzzles him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “It’s nice. I miss you.”

“I’m right here, Dean,” Sam says.

“I know you are,” Dean says and he sounds really goddamn sad, even to himself.

They lay there like that until Dean feels Sam’s breathing even out with sleep. He thinks of the key again—always, that damn key—and how just completely fucking careless it is of Sam to fall asleep without locking him back up.

Then it occurs to him to think about what that could mean. It means that if he wants to, he can get up, being so, _so_ careful not to wake him and slip from Sam’s arms, put on his clothes, walk out the door. He could disappear if he wanted to. He knows how to do it and there are still a couple of people out there who might help him hide if he asked for it.

There are also more than a few who would put a bullet in his head if they knew what he had done and why he was running, but he knows which ones they are and can stay away from them.

Sam mumbles something unintelligible in his sleep and pushes his face against the back of Dean’s shoulder. Dean puts his arm over Sam’s around his waist and strokes the back of his hand lightly, tracing his fingers. He knows he’s not leaving and the knowledge kind of disgusts him, but there it is. Sam may wear that blasted key around his neck, but that lock isn’t what keeps Dean here.

“Goddamn you, Sammy,” Dean whispers. He closes his eyes and feels the weight of sleep sink into him. He welcomes it, drifting to sleep as he thinks of his prison as Sam’s open hand.

~~*~~

When Pascal came back to the bar and told him it was done, without question or protest, Dean went with him. Pascal did not have to let him see Sam again; that was not part of the deal. It occurred to Dean that maybe he should ask for proof, but he didn’t. In part, because he believed the demon when he said they wanted Sam up here and in part because he didn’t want to see it. If Pascal had kept his word, then Sam would be alive in the world again, but if he hadn’t… well, if he hadn’t, then it didn’t really matter.

Pascal lived in a basement apartment beneath a pet shop. Unlike the dwelling places of most demons of Dean’s acquaintance, it was clean, lived-in, and there wasn’t a single weapon or demonic artifact in sight. This did not mean they were not there, of course, but Pascal apparently didn’t like to advertise. Or he just wasn’t careless enough to leave that kind of shit lying around.

They went into the living room and were greeted by a big dark dog that Pascal affectionately called Harvey. The dog pounced on his master, who playfully shoved him back on the floor, then turned his attention on Dean.

“Ah… hi,” Dean said awkwardly, patting the dog’s wide head. This was all so _normal_ that he suddenly felt painfully out of place.

Harvey sniffed him, circling him and burrowing his nose into Dean’s clothes. When Dean tried to push him away from his crotch, the dog growled and he went still, looking to Pascal.

Pascal grinned at him and shrugged out of his coat. “I think he likes you,” he said.

“That’s… fantastic,” Dean said. “Dude, he’s not going to bite down or anything is he? Because…”

Pascal laughed and shook his head. “Not unless I tell him to,” he said. He snapped a command at the dog in some strange language Dean didn’t recognize and the dog backed away. It snorted, expelling Dean’s scent from his nose, and went to lie down in the doorway on the other side of the room.

“What the hell kind of dog is that?” Dean asked. He didn’t like the animal, it made him nervous and he couldn’t really say why because he liked most dogs.

Smiling, Pascal walked around him and Dean felt himself tense. He didn’t like having the demon at his back like that, but there wasn’t much he could do or say about it. He’d agreed to this. He’d agreed to _everything_.

“Harvey is what happens when you take a mutt bred from the most beautiful and vicious dogs on earth and mate it to a hell hound,” Pascal said, murmuring it in Dean’s ear as he took Dean’s coat from him. “But don’t worry so much. I’ve already told you; he likes you.”

“And I wonder why I don’t find that very...” Dean jerked as Pascal slipped an arm around him and worked the tongue of his belt free, “…comforting. What are you doing?”

“Me?” Pascal said. “Why… I’m not doing anything.” He nipped the back of Dean’s neck and opened his belt with a sharp jerk that made Dean’s breath hitch. “Getting you naked so I can look at you and… admire my new acquisition. That’s really not anything and I’m sure… very soon… you will agree.”

Dean’s fingers itched with the desire to smack Pascal’s hands away from him, but he closed his hands into fists and restrained himself. He reminded himself that he’d made a deal, this was the arrangement, he’d agreed to all of this.

His breathing became heavier and his heart started to race as Pascal’s long fingered hands opened his jeans and worked their way inside to smooth over his thighs. “Take off your shirt,” Pascal whispered, following the order with a lick to Dean’s earlobe that made him jerk. “One button at a time. I want to watch your hands shake.”

Dean lifted his hands to do it, noticed them shaking and instantly put them back down. “I can’t do this,” he said. For some absurd reason, his eyes fell on the dog lying in the doorway and he felt even worse. The dog was watching him intently with its strange yellow eyes and Dean flushed, wanting to turn away. “I know I’m being stupid and nothing I say is going to change anything, but I have to say it anyway so I can… not hate myself completely. I can’t do this. I want you to stop.”

“You’ve changed your mind?” Pascal asked softly, his hands not even hesitating as he continued to stroke them up Dean’s hips, over his belly.

Changing his mind meant Sam dead, it meant Dean alone and more responsible than ever. “I can’t do that either,” Dean muttered. “Set in blood, remember?”

“I remember,” Pascal said. “Your blood tastes like peppers and sugar. Now take your shirt off. Remember—”

“One button at a time, yeah,” Dean said. He lifted his hands again and fumbled the first button free. The second one almost popped off before he got it loose and he realized he was breathing so hard he was almost panting with it. _I can’t do this, I can’t do this,_ repeated over and over in his head as he forced himself to finish unbuttoning his shirt.

“You _are_ doing this,” Pascal said.

Dean jumped and looked at him nervously. “Did you just—?”

“You were saying it aloud,” Pascal said, his garnet brown eyes flashing with amusement.

“Oh,” Dean said. He rolled his shoulders to let his shirt drop, but Pascal caught it and tossed it over the back of a chair.

Dean stood there without moving, expecting every moment that he was free of it for Pascal’s hands to touch him. He tensed when he felt Pascal’s warm tongue draw a line up his back and jerked when he nipped the nape of his neck sharply with his teeth, but he stood. He tried thinking of it like a battle waged with caresses and kisses, of his not bolting for the door like standing his ground in the field.

It didn’t really work.

Pascal had licked his way back down Dean’s spine and was slowly easing his jeans down his hips when Dean pulled away from him and turned.

Crouched there on the floor on his heels, Pascal looked up at him with whiskey eyes that flashed red in the light and grinned. “You’re not going to do this the easy way, are you, Winchester?” he asked.

Dean could see the flick of a tail, the opening of wings, the fan of scales in the shadows of every move the creature made and was suddenly reminded, like a heavy blow to the stomach, that the man before him was _not_ a man. He didn’t change at all; every inch of him looked human. The inhumanity was in the way he moved like he had more joints and muscles in places that they didn’t belong. It was in the way the pupils of his eyes constricted like those of a cat. It made his skin crawl and it didn’t matter what he’d promised or to whom he had vowed—he just couldn’t do it.

“No,” Dean said. His voice cracked on the word, but he didn’t fucking care. He was reaching for his shirt to put it back on when Pascal caught his hand. “Don’t,” Dean snapped and tried to take his hand back.

Pascal bared his teeth in a growl and tightened his grip until Dean’s mouth fell open in pain. “Written in blood, demon slayer,” he hissed, and used his hold on Dean’s hand to throw him back.

Dean hit the sofa and scrambled backward on it as Pascal advanced on him. Every step was like the stalking movement of a tiger in the wild and just like the prey; Dean panicked and tried to get away.

“No one said you had to _yield_ ,” Pascal said, his voice a hissing whisper that echoed in the room as he circled around Dean, drawing closer. “It will be no less painful for you if you fight me, nor worse. But it will be so… much… better.”

His hand shot out and caught Dean’s heel, jerked and threw Dean back on the sofa, his shoulder hitting the wall as he went down. He cursed himself as the demon crawled up his body for not bringing a gun with him. He’d thought it would make a bad impression, trying to make a deal with a demon while holding it at gunpoint and he’d also thought he might be tempted to use it, so he’d left them all back at the motel. Now, with Pascal literally breathing down his neck, he wished he’d brought one anyway.

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Pascal said. He slipped an arm around Dean’s neck, pressing against his throat as he whispered in his ear. “Shoot me. You don’t even know my name, Winchester. How can you hope to kill me?”

“I’ve killed things I couldn’t name before,” Dean managed. “I could kill you.”

“Mmmm, yes, perhaps,” Pascal said. He had Dean’s wrists in a rough grip behind his back and used his hold there to shove him farther into the room. “But then who do you think would take my place? Signed in blood means you can’t ever be free of it.”

He shoved Dean down on his knees on the floor and Dean jerked against him, trying to fight his way back up, only to be held there. He felt the carpet burn against his knees and looked down at himself to find his clothes gone. He tried to remember when that had happened and couldn’t. He’d still had his pants on when Pascal dragged him off the couch.

“It means… I can sell you, trade you, lose you to another if they’re strong enough to take you, but it will follow you everywhere you go,” Pascal said. He hissed a strange language that echoed in the room like the slide of a fish belly on sandstone and Dean’s arms were pulled around in front of him as something cold and liquid wrapped around his hands and wrists. “It means you belong to me now,” Pascal said, kneeling on the carpet in front of him, his knees pressed to Dean’s. “Every inch of you is mine. To use, to barter…”

He leaned in and licked the side of Dean’s neck. Dean jerked his head back and growled at him. “Fuck you,” he panted.

Pascal laughed and reached out to run the knuckles of one hand up Dean’s side. “That too,” he murmured.

Something cold moved over the backs of Dean’s thighs and he jerked and then tried to turn his head to look around. Pascal chuckled low in his ear and caught his earlobe in his teeth, preventing it. “Ah-ah, face me,” he said.

Dean panted roughly, his heart thundering in his throat, and shook his head a little. The movement made Pascal’s teeth pull at his ear and he gasped. “Something’s on me,” he said.

“I know, I put it there,” Pascal said. “Now be still.”

Dean tried to move his arms and bring them down, but when he’d been paying attention to the cold thing sliding around his legs, the watery band around his hands had reached toward the ceiling and he was bound fast in place. Dean’s heart crashed against his ribs and he looked at Pascal in alarm. “You… you know you don’t have to tie me,” he said. His voice cracked all over the place and if Dean weren’t so freaked out by what was happening to him, he might have found that embarrassing.

“You’ll get over that, you know,” Pascal said. He had both hands on Dean’s hips now and gently pulled at them.

For some reason, the _gently_ part of that made him feel a little sick. How _dare_ this creature touch him like that. How dare it manipulate and imprison him and plan to torment him then run its hands over him like it cared what he felt. How dare it be gentle with him, even for a moment?

“Don’t worry, it won’t last, I promise you,” Pascal murmured. He pulled at Dean’s hips again and this time Dean, without any conscious volition, moved into the urge of that touch. “Lean down,” Pascal said. “Just a little.”

“You don’t have to tie me,” Dean said. He tilted his head back to look up at Pascal. Pascal’s dark hair had fallen in his eyes, which glowed back at him like burning coals and made Dean shiver. Against the back of his thighs, the cold thing tightened and when Dean tried to move, he was held in place as though by iron with his legs open. He swallowed and felt the tick in the back of his throat. “You know you don’t have to.”

Pascal’s lips curved in a slow, wicked smile. “I know I don’t,” he agreed. He smoothed his hand down Dean’s belly and closed his fingers around his cock. He squeezed lightly and Dean caught his breath, instant pleasure like the tightening of leather bands constricted inside him and his mouth fell open a little. “Oh yes, I know. But believe me, Winchester; you’re going to be glad I did.”

There was a whisper of warm fur along Dean’s side and he turned his head to meet the strange, intelligent eyes of Pascal’s dog. The animal sort of listed to one side to rub its side along Dean’s ribs, into the dip of his waist. Dean twitched away from it, then jerked and bit his lip on a moan as Pascal squeezed him lightly and started to move his hand, jerking him off.

If it could even be called that. The touch was light, the pulls gentle, it was all more like teasing or playing than sex.

“Get it away,” Dean said, shaking his head back and locking gazes with Pascal as the dog turned its head and nudged him.

Pascal smiled and shook his head. He looked at the dog over Dean’s shoulder, murmured a word Dean didn’t know and couldn’t have uttered if asked to, and Dean heard a soft chuffing sound from the dog, felt it huff against his hip.

Dean noticed his arms were shaking, and not from tension; he was bound securely and could relax into the bonds, had he felt like relaxing. It was a quicksilver feeling of dread running up and down his spine, sending thrills of fear stabbing through his belly to cover the pleasure in Pascal’s touch with a sickly coat.

He looked back at Pascal and tilted his head, eyes flashing with a sudden spark of defiance that was close to challenging. “I’ve been to Hell,” he told the demon. “Do your worst.”

“Bravado,” Pascal whispered, amused and pleased. “I like it, Winchester.” He leaned in close to Dean and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. His fingers tightened a little around Dean’s cock and his thumb worked in a slow circle of precome around the head until Dean gritted his teeth to hold back another moan. “I _will_ ,” Pascal said, breathing it against Dean’s lips. “Do my worst. Oh, I will. And so have I. I like it there, especially around Christmas. It’s rather homey.”

Dean shook his head as though trying to banish Pascal’s voice from his ears, but he couldn’t get away and he couldn’t get free to cover his ears. “Just do… whatever you’re going to do and get it over with,” Dean said.

“Is that _eagerness_ I detect?” Pascal asked. His free hand roamed up Dean’s chest to pinch one of his nipples and he laughed when Dean twitched, twisting a little away from him. “Oh, very well,” he said and then snapped something at the dog.

Dean had forgotten the dog. For just a second he had forgotten the thing was even there, then the dog was sniffing around his legs and he started to shake. “What did you say?”

Pascal smiled and said nothing, but his hand closed more tightly around Dean’s cock and he made the strokes of his hand just a little bit more firm.

Dean moaned and tried to twist his hips to get away from it, from the unwanted pleasure of it, but he couldn’t twist with enough freedom of motion to do anything more than cause Pascal to pull at him more. Behind him, the dog (Harvey, his mind supplied for some absurd reason) nosed one of Dean’s thighs and he caught his breath at the cold wet of the animal’s nose on his hot skin.

“Stop,” Dean panted, shaking with the need to get away from the pleasure Pascal was causing him and the nervous dread at _why_ his dog was so suddenly interested in him. “Pascal,” Dean said, disgusted with himself as he uttered the name. How he said it, soft and plaintive. God, he was close to begging and the demon hadn’t actually done anything more than give him a hand-job.

“Shh, forget about him,” Pascal said. He leaned in so that the warmth of his body rushed against Dean’s chest. Touching and not touching—not a skill many humans excelled at. It made Dean catch his breath and shake. “Move with it and don’t think about the dog just yet,” Pascal murmured. He put his mouth close to Dean’s ear, breathed down the side of his neck, and slowed his hand on his cock to light pulling motions. Teasing again. “There will be plenty of time for that. Right now… move your hips. Come on.”

Dean made a strained sound of want in his throat and when Pascal ran the pad of his thumb along the head of his cock, he rolled his hips into the touch, trying to tell himself it was instinctive. It wasn’t because it felt really fucking good and he wanted to get off. Instinct. Sure.

“There you go,” Pascal said. “That’s better. Isn’t that better?”

Dean shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He felt like he was going to be sick, actually.

For some reason the whole thing suddenly had Dean thinking of the Devil tempting Jesus in the dessert. What would that have been like if the Devil had put his hands down the Son of God’s pants and tugged on his dick? Probably not a lot different than what really happened… except maybe the Devil would have gotten decked. Too bad Dean wasn’t Jesus.

Pascal’s dog licked the back of his thigh and Dean jumped. His eyes snapped wide and he jerked his head around to stare at Pascal. “What’s it doing?” he asked, panic rising in his throat, making his heart beat painfully in the back of his eyes. “What the fuck did you tell it to do?”

The dog licked his thigh again, dragging his warm tongue up the back of Dean’s leg, over his ass. Dean started breathing through his nose to keep from gasping every frightened breath. He felt the dog’s nose against his ass, felt it push against him a little, then almost screamed when it licked into the crack of his ass.

Dean’s hands closed into fists, tendon and muscle standing out against the bindings, and he stared at Pascal. “What did you tell it to do?” he asked again, voice a raspy whisper.

Pascal smiled and reached out to run his index finger up Dean’s throat, under his chin until he tilted his head up. “This is one of those instances where it’s really just better to… show, not tell,” Pascal murmured. He ran the pad of his thumb over Dean’s full bottom lip and watched his face carefully.

The dog licked and licked, tongue slimy and prodding. Then Dean felt it enter him just a little and cried out, his back bowing as he tried to get away from it. Pascal’s fingers slid away from his chin and Dean ducked his head, turning his face away to stare down at the carpet. Maroon carpet. Like blood, he thought as he felt the dog move up behind him. Like blood so it would cover blood.

Pascal’s long fingers squeezed him and Dean’s hips jerked. He felt the dog’s fur against his back, felt its rough paws on his shoulders. Pascal laughed softly and breathed his warm breath against Dean’s neck, along his jaw, licked at his mouth as Dean gasped for breath and tried valiantly not to beg him for mercy. He thought he was going to scream at any second and it the only real wonder of the whole fucked up situation was that he hadn’t yet.

Then he felt the dog’s dick pushing inside him and all of his bravery, all of his will, all of his good intentions and every single thought of valiance went straight out the goddamn window. He screamed. His shoulders tense under the animal’s paws, shaking, sweat making a soft sheen on his skin, his head bowed and the demon’s hateful, pleasurable touch on his body—all of it melted to nothing. It became the pinprick of a moment in time where it could all have stopped, then that moment was broken and Dean screamed and kept his face hidden from Pascal so he could keep the shame of it to himself.

The dog thrust inside him and licked the back of his neck and Dean kept his face turned away and shook his head violently from side to side as though if he just kept doing it, he’d shake himself awake and find himself wrapped up in bed sheets, waking from a really horrible nightmare. If he told himself _no_ in just the right way, it would be true.

There is breath against his ear, warm and panting breath, but it’s not the demon, it’s the dog. Pascal has sat back a little to watch it, his eyes like bright, bloody mirrors, and as Dean looks at him, he runs his tongue over his teeth. He catches Dean watching him and laughs, then reaches out and slides his hand up the back of Dean’s neck, into his hair, where he fists his hand. “I told you Harvey liked you, didn’t I?” he murmured.

Dean’s mouth dropped open on a soft, breathless cry and Pascal lowered his head to lick at his mouth. The dog growled against his back there was nothing but the soft brushing caress of fur along Dean’s spine as it started to move faster, harder, humping against his ass and shoving its cock relentlessly into him. Pascal nipped his lips and Dean jerked his head, whimpering and turning his face away again.

He thought of how a dog’s penis looks, slick and red, pointed and almost _sharp_ , and felt it slide over his prostate. Unwelcome pleasure sliced through him and Dean wrapped his fingers around the bindings that ran all the way from his wrists to the ceiling and held on, his body trembling with spasms as he kept himself still as he could. He thought of the pointed canine dick _stabbing_ into him as the demon licked inside his mouth and ran his tongue over his teeth, but it didn’t lessen the pleasure of it.

The dog growled again and licked at Dean’s shoulder as it pushed against him, quick little thrusts as it tried to force its cock all the way into his body. Dean cried out, then gasped as Pascal twisted his fingers in his hair more tightly and jerked his head back farther, almost painfully, and ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth, tasting each harshly drawn breath and cry.

Chuckling low in his throat, the sound rumbling like it was half-growl, half-purr, Pascal licked out of Dean’s mouth. “Such a pretty mouth you have, Winchester,” he whispered, speaking with his lips less than an inch from Dean’s. “Your bottom lip quivers just a little. So pretty.” His rough hold on Dean’s hair gentled slightly and he stroked his fingers down the back of his neck. “Take the knot,” Pascal hissed softly, licking at his lips. “Take the knot, take the knot, take the knot…”

The dog thrust over his prostate and Dean cried out, tossing his head to get away from Pascal’s maddening mockery. He felt the dog’s teeth on his back, not biting, just pressing like it couldn’t bear it, and Dean hated the creature then for enjoying what it was doing to him. He didn’t care if it was a dumb animal or not (though he suspected it was _not_ a dumb animal), he hated it as much as he hated its master in that moment.

Just when he didn’t think he could despise the creature any more, or be more disgusted with himself than he was, a strong spark of pleasure shot through him and Dean’s hips involuntarily jerked back. He felt Pascal’s hands on him, sliding up his belly, over his ribs, felt the way his grip tightened when he laughed, felt the dog thrust all the way into him as the knot in its penis shoved past the contracting muscle of his ass, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. Except he had to, that was the hell of it; there was no choice here, he had to bear it.

“Please,” Dean gasped. The dog thrust against him and he grunted softly in reaction, rocking forward under the weight of the animal. “Please… Pascal, please…”

“Please what?’ Pascal asked. He lifted a hand to gently brush Dean’s sweaty hair back from his face and Dean felt like his skin was going to crawl right off his body and flee from the touch. “Tell me.”

_Beg me._

And he was. Or he was seconds away from doing just that. Seconds from begging the demon to let him go, to make it stop, to show him mercy, even a scrap. And he knew with absolute certainty that he would not get it. The dog would fuck him until it was finished and Pascal would have one more thing he wanted from Dean.

With a moan that was one part despair and one part pleasure, Dean stretched out his neck and caught Pascal’s mouth in a hard kiss. The demon was so stunned by it for a moment that he didn’t react, then he blinked, laughed into his mouth and shoved his mouth to Dean’s kissing him back.

The dog whined and Dean cried out into Pascal’s mouth, the sound only a little muffled as it was swallowed in the kiss. Inside him, the knot in the dog’s penis rubbed against his prostate and Dean closed his eyes, tears of shame and rage making them sting with salt as he worked his hips back into it. Pascal bit his mouth and there was blood on his tongue as they kissed, then the dog started to come and it slid inside of him like warm mucus and Dean screamed.

He tore his mouth away from Pascal’s and the demon sat back, watching him writhe in his bonds as he licked Dean’s blood from his lips. With a soft laugh, Pascal wrapped his fingers around Dean’s cock again and squeezed, and Dean cried out again, jerking against the touch. The dog bit lightly at his shoulder and Dean moaned and squirmed as the pleasure of Pascal’s touch along with the over-filling sensation of the dog’s semen made his body shake and tense.

“Oh God,” Dean panted. His back arched and his hips bucked back against the dog, forcing it’s dick deeper into him, making it rub over his prostate until his every breath hitched on a moan. “Fuck, oh God, please just…”

Watching his face, Pascal slowly lowered himself onto his elbows on the floor and licked up the length of Dean’s cock. Dean looked down at him between his bent arms and swallowed around a shock of perverse pleasure at the sight. One of Pascal’s hands pushed up Dean’s thigh, with the other, he caught Dean’s hip to hold him steady, then lowered his mouth over his cock and sucked. Lightly, a little harder, a little harder… then he swallowed with the head of Dean’s cock against the back of his throat and Dean threw his head back and came.

It was the most humiliating orgasm he’d ever experienced. There were dog teeth in his shoulder, hot canine breath on his skin, a dog’s long penis inside him, roughly working against his prostate until he felt like he was going to come out of his skin, and there was a demon with its mouth around his cock, swallowing every drop as Dean came down his throat. And he liked it, which was part of the hell. He liked it, and not just the part where he got off.

The dog went on coming for almost half an hour and by the time it stopped, Dean was moaning and writhing to get away from it because it was starting to hurt. Pascal lay on the floor, propped up on his elbows and watching the entire time, savoring every twitch and whimper, waiting to hear Dean beg him to make it stop. But Dean didn’t and Pascal didn’t pull the dog off of him, he left them tied up like that while Dean panted and shivered and sweated, until the dog pulled out of him and climbed off.

When he did, Dean moaned with relief and slumped, almost finding some kind of sick pleasure in it as the dog come gushed from his body and ran down his thighs to soak the carpet around his knees. He stared down at the floor, watching the pearly, slimy fluid coat his legs and turn the blood red carpet black around him and distantly, he wondered if he might be in shock.

Probably.

“Now then, I’m not done with you,” Pascal said, getting up from the floor. He went around Dean, his eyes sliding over every decadent, defiled inch of him until Dean could swear he felt his gaze on him like hands. “What is that they say? ‘Not by a long shot’, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Dean said, voice croaking and sore in his throat.

“Yes, well I’m not, but we’ll leave you for now,” Pascal said, coming back around to stand in front of Dean, head cocked thoughtfully to one side like a bird’s. “For one thing, you’re going to need to be hosed down and cleaned up. I don’t do that whole sloppy seconds thing, and certainly not for Harvey. By the by, have you ever had an enema?”

Dean blinked at him. He was shivering and he felt wretched. “When I was a kid, I think,” he said, speaking very carefully so he could be sure of the words. “Why?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Pascal said, waving one hand as though dismissing the subject. His eyes were glowing, Dean noticed, and he wondered if maybe that was in his head. “It’s just… they can be quite fun—at least from an observational point of view. It a bit like taking the knot in your ass—except _fuller_. I think I might give you one. You can tell me if it’s enjoyable from a participatory point of view as well. For posterity, you understand. Strictly for posterity.”

Shivering, Dean looked away from him and closed his eyes. He couldn’t even think about whatever other perverse shit Pascal was planning to do to him—which was fine because he really didn’t want to at the moment. No, at the moment, he kind of wished the demon would go away and leave him alone with his shock and the cold come sliding down his legs. He was sure that whatever disgusting shit he could come up with if he put his mind to it was _nothing_ set beside what Pascal could devise. After all, the demon had been trained in Hell by the best. But of course, he was going to hear about it if Pascal wanted to talk about it, which he apparently did.

“You know, anticipation is half of the fun,” Pascal said. He was circling him again and Dean vaguely thought of a vulture circling the carcass of a dead possum. “Anticipation of pain increases the pain once it’s inflicted—through fear and dread and all that nonsense and shit. So, by the same reasoning, anticipation of humiliation and discomfort should increase it through fear, right?”

“Why humiliation?” Dean asked. He didn’t look up as he said it. He didn’t want to see the demon’s handsome face looking down at him or the dog in the doorway licking his chops.

Pascal leaned down and caught Dean’s chin in his hand, holding him so he was forced to look into his garnet eyes. “Because pain doesn’t move you enough,” he said. “Because to take away your self-respect and dignity… To make you a _thing_ … Because every time I fuck you I break you a little.”

Dean shivered violently and cringed away from him. All he wanted right now was to curl up into a fetal ball and disappear for a little while. _Find a happy place_ , he thought, and his stomach felt like it was going to flip right out of his body and dump itself at his knees in the dog come.

Pascal let him go and stood, walked around him, letting his fingertips trail the length of Dean’s spine. Then he smacked him sharply on the ass and walked out of the room, turning off the light as he went and leaving Dean to hang there in the dog’s filth.

~~*~~

Dean wakes to the sound of a woman singing and lays still in the dark as he listens to it. He moves his hand out over the bed beside him to find the sheets cold with Sam’s absence and thinks that maybe he’s gotten up and turned the radio on in the kitchen. But there’s not light on in the kitchen. Then he reminds himself that it’s Sam, and he sees like it is daylight in the dark, so he probably didn’t bother to turn it on.

He turns his head on the pillow and blinks away sleep as his eyes focus on Sam standing by the big round window. The moon is slicing through the glass, casting sharp little lines over his arms and chest, painting the rest of him with silver glow. As he watches, Sam lifts one hand like he’s reaching out to stroke the back of a pet cat. They don’t have a cat or a pet of any kind if you don’t count the shadows that watch Dean from the corners, which he doesn’t. Still, something meets Sam’s outstretched hand and it takes Dean a moment to realize what it is because just watching it, it _makes no sense_.

The roses.

One of the half-open blossoms raises itself on its thorn vine like the head of a cobra and moves into the touch of Sam’s fingers like a kitten. Sam’s fingertips slide lightly along the edges of the petals and the flower opens ever so slightly to the caress.

Dean holds his breath and wonders if he’s dreaming, and in wondering that, he knows that he’s not.

Sam makes a soft murmuring sound of affection to the plant and Dean clenches his fingers in the bed sheet when Sam tilts his head and the moonlight catches in his eyes, casting back bright yellow darts. He tries not to remember the color of Sam’s eyes, because they may be changeable and deep, but they are _not_ abysmal and flaming. They’re not. They’re sometimes blue, sometimes grey, sometimes brown, sometimes green, or a combination, but they are fucking well not _yellow_.

Except they are. Only rarely, and only when Sam doesn’t think they are, but they are. They flash, or the light does, and there is a shine on his eyes like thunder in the bottom of a well. Dean remembers it, how it would catch him by surprise in the days when Sam still fought it, and he thinks of how it is now. How it’s not always the yellow in his eyes he finds so shocking, it’s the way Sam carries silver threads of cobwebbing in his eyelashes.

The singing woman’s voice raises and Dean looks around for the origin of the sound, only to come back to the roses, which have reached out to Sam as though seeking the comforting touch of a master. Understanding comes to him gradually and Dean sits up without fully realizing what he’s doing.

“They’re singing,” Sam says without turning his head. “Don’t move.”

Dean nods slowly and then catches himself. _Don’t move._

Sam holds out his hand toward the flowers with his fingers spread and Dean watches with growing horror and fascination as a thorn vine raises with the movement and slips between Sam’s fingers. It winds around his hand like a ribbon and tightens when Sam closes his fingers. Blood wells in the creases of Sam’s fingers, slides under his fingernails, runs down his arm, and drips from his elbow onto the carpet.

Dean opens his mouth to say something—possibly to tell Sam to get away from it—then remembers himself and closes his mouth with a snap. He wants to ask Sam why he shouldn’t move, but he’d have to move to do that too and as he watches Sam with the rose, he thinks maybe that isn’t such a good idea because the rose has stopped singing and now he thinks maybe, possibly… even though it sounds absurd, Sam’s _feeding_ it.

The thorn vine tightens even more around Sam’s fingers and slithers up his forearm to wrap around and squeeze until Dean can see the way it dimples Sam’s flesh, it’s gripping him so tight. Sam jerks his arm once, but not hard. Like he’s playing with the thing. Some kind of super fucked up game of tug-o-war where one side bleeds and nobody wins.

Sam’s teeth flash white in the dark and Dean catches his breath and shrinks back on the bed. He knows that smile and it terrifies him a little how it can arouse him and scare the shit out of him all at once. How he can see Sam there in the slow curve of that mouth, the dimple in his cheek, and then those eyes flash with internal light and that same smile is suddenly a thousand years sly and Dean has to bite his own tongue not to scream.

The vine suddenly releases Sam and slides down his arm, slithering like a serpent, with all the cunning of a lover, with a touch that lingers so it’s remembered later. Sam moves his fingers, closing and opening his hand a finger at a time as though testing the sensation of some pleasantly tingling poison in his blood.

The rose leaves shiver briefly, then still and the plant is just a plant. Except it’s not. Dean’s seen how it really is, sentient and savage and more than a little in love with his brother. Even still like that, he watches it with wary disgust before he allows his eyes to drift back to Sam, framed in the window.

Sam opens and closes his hand again, then walks to the bed, to Dean, and cups his face in his hand. Dean feels the cold wet of Sam’s blood on his lips and starts to pull away when Sam pushes his thumb into his mouth and holds him as he moves it over Dean’s tongue.

“Swallow,” Sam says. He leans down and nuzzles the side of Dean’s face, his breath warm on Dean’s ear. “Close your mouth, Dean. Swallow it.”

 _A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down_ , Dean thinks insanely, but he does what he’s told and swallows around the pad of Sam’s thumb. The salt tang of his blood slides down his throat and coats his mouth and Dean realizes he’s sucking when Sam gently pulls his thumb from his mouth and walks away.

Dean licks his lips and his eyes dart to the rosebush by the window. In his head, he hears the voice of a woman singing, beautiful and strong, just too soft to make out the words, which he thinks might be in Italian of all things. The leaves nearest the window rustle and it might be the wind or it might not be and Dean fervently wishes he were dreaming. God, how he wishes he were dreaming, and in wishing it, he knows he’s not.

~~*~~

Pascal only had Dean for three days, but in that time, Dean recalled Hell so often that it started to bleed in around the edges when he was exhausted and delirious. Those three days were an eternity multiplied and squared, stretched into an infinitesimal breach of time. The minutes of those days were like grains of sand in a dessert, like spoons of water in an ocean; painful to measure, more painful to endure.

In that time, Dean was fucked in every position imaginable, with Pascal’s body and with other things. Whatever the demon could think of. Whatever would hurt more and humiliate to the very last degree. Pascal fucked him wearing a condom crusted in table salt—something he thought vastly amusing and Dean found to be one of the more painful experiences of his life. He was brought again and again to humiliating orgasm by Harvey. He was strapped down and beaten until he lost consciousness only to wake without a scar on him and be beaten again. At one point, Pascal cut a line down his back with a single-edged razorblade, filled the wound with gunpowder, and lit it just to watch it burn its way up his spine like a fuse while Dean screamed and writhed and yes, in the end, begged.

Then, on the fourth day, Sam came for him and Dean foolishly believed himself to be saved.

Dean passed in and out of unconsciousness on the cross. He heard voices, whispered, murmured, shouted voices. Once, he even thought he heard singing. He was delirious, he decided—or at least he thought so when he could stay awake long enough to formulate such thoughts. Bound in the dark, upright with his chin resting on his collarbone, he woke to the sound of voices and tried to stay awake long enough to listen.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying and soon exhaustion and pain won out and he slept again.

He woke to a hand on his cheek, fingers pressing warm against his face, urging him to lift his head. He did it and light caught on his eyelids, washing his vision in red for a moment before his eyes fluttered open.

Sam stood there, his hair fallen in his eyes, his expression carefully blank. Dean felt a thrill of something that made him open his eyes wider and after a second, he recognized it as hope.

He licked his lips and tried to speak. His first attempt at that failed, but he swallowed and managed to say Sam’s name.

Sam’s lips curved in a smile and he leaned in to touch his tongue to the hollow under Dean’s left eye. Dean tilted his head toward him, hungering for that touch to make him forget where he was at and what was happening—even if he was only dreaming it. Even if Sam wasn’t really there, he wanted to be touched by that hallucination.

Sam pressed his lips to the slant of Dean’s cheekbone and ran his tongue between them. Dean blinked and felt warm tears sliding between his eyelashes and his heart twisted at what Sam was doing; he was drinking his tears.

Dean made a soft noise in his throat and tried to speak again, but Sam moved his mouth over his and shushed him. He petted his fingers through Dean’s hair by his ear and took a step back. As he did, Dean opened his eyes and saw Pascal standing behind Sam over his shoulder.

As Sam stepped back and Pascal’s arms came around him, Dean still wasn’t sure that he wasn’t still asleep and dreaming it. Then the cross he was on moved and Dean was over them, hanging from it and staring down at them from the ceiling as Sam turned into Pascal’s arms and tilted his head back so the demon could kiss him.

Dean’s body was sore from being crucified, held upright with the pressure of his own weight on his lungs, and being moved like that, he was suddenly hanging from those bonds, the rawhide around his ankles and wrists the only things keeping him there. He watched as the demon fell on Sam and Sam rose to his touch, the whole time, his circulation was being cut off by the straps biting into his wrists so his arms trembled from the strain of being suspended that way.

“Sam,” Dean managed, the sound almost a bark between lips that were cracked with a throat raw as sandpaper. It came out broken and soft, but it drew Sam’s attention to him and for an instant, Dean saw his eyes swim with yellow light.

He didn’t say anything more as Sam and Pascal rolled over the floor, growling and biting at each other, fucking like two rabid animals that didn’t much care whether they killed each other before it was over. He closed his eyes and tried not to watch it, but Sam cried and moaned and Dean couldn’t help it; he looked. He watched the way they tangled around each other like two serpents in a dance and in the light, which had dimmed, they seemed to wrap like liquid ropes until it didn’t matter who was fucking who, only that they were.

So this was the price he had to pay for his freedom. That they _both_ had to pay. He had thought, if Sam came for him, that there would surely be a price and that price wouldn’t be easy, but he’d never thought it would be _that_. Later, Dean might think that it was a small one, relatively speaking, but while it was happening, it was all the days of Hell folded together into tiny origami squares and made one. Later, he might think it wasn’t so bad, but while he was watching it, he felt his helplessness and hatred like a barbed weight. It was the weight of his inability to do anything about it. The weight of his guilt because, if all it would take was Sam sacrificing his body in lust to the demon, Dean would pay it again and again just to escape.

He would never tell Sam this, but he would always believe that Sam knew it anyway.

~~*~~

That little touch of Hell had changed him.

Dean is thinking this as he wakes to the smell of something baking in the kitchen. He remembers Sam before he died, how he held onto his humanity, fragile and precarious as that hold sometimes seemed to be. Then he died and Dean had him brought back and it was over. There was no struggle with his human side and his demon side. The demon side had won at last. All it had taken was a lick of fire, a smell of sulfur, the brush of impish wings and what little remained of Sam’s humanity and melted and curled away like skin parchment under a candle flame.

Banishing those lingering dream-recalled memories from his mind, Dean sits up and pulls the sheet up to his chest to cover himself. He gets up from the bed, reaching behind himself to wrap the sheet around his ass like a long skirt, and follows the sweet smell of baking and Sam’s low whistling into the kitchen.

He finds Sam taking a cookie sheet of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and halts in the doorway to watch him. He’s shirtless, wearing black soft linen trousers that miraculously stay up without the help of the draw-string, and for just a second, Dean forgets a few things and reaches out to let his fingertips ghost over Sam’s shoulder.

Sam turns his head and looks at him, one brow lifted as he runs his eyes down Dean’s body, then he laughs and reaches over on the countertop for the curl of tube wrapping the cookie dough came in. “’Morning,” he says. He takes a warm cookie from the sheet and takes a bite as he tosses the Pillsbury wrapper at the trashcan.

“’Morning,” Dean mutters. He runs his fingers through his hair with a sigh and makes his way across the kitchen to the counter to make himself a cup of coffee.

“Your clothes are by the bed,” Sam says. He leans against the counter next to the stove and watches Dean as he finishes his cookie.

“Yeah, I forgot,” Dean says. He stirs in a spoonful of sugar and shakes the powdered creamer over his coffee, stirs that in and sips, all without looking at Sam. It’s quite the accomplishment, he thinks wryly. Even evil, Sam’s not the least bit hard on the eyes—especially when he’s half naked, being all Stepford Wife-like. Not that Dean, even fucked up as he knows he is, has a thing for Stepford Wives. Or wives of any kind whatever. It’s just… cute. Well, no, it’s kind of creepy, but it would be cute if it weren’t for the circumstances.

“You forgot?” Sam says. Dean hears him sigh and looks out the window over the sink, trying to ignore him.

He feels Sam watching him like an itch between his shoulder blades. He remembers when they were hunters how he would sometimes get that same feeling right about the time something tried to stick a knife in his back.

Looking out the window, through his own wraithlike reflection, he ponders that for a few seconds. Outside, it’s that early time of the morning when everything is wet looking and either black or shades of grey. Most people, even in such a large, busy city, are still sleeping this early. Sleeping it off, hitting their snooze buttons, brushing their teeth, showering for work, checking their watches and the clocks on their microwaves, eating their instant oatmeal, waking their children, burrowing down in their beds for just _ten more minutes_ , yawning as they take their terriers for morning walks and watch them shit under the neighbor’s mailbox.

Strangely, more than being chained to the bed, it is times like these and thoughts like this that make Dean feel like Sammy’s kept whore.

“Hey, have a cookie,” Sam says, coming up behind him. He offers it to Dean over his shoulder and Dean takes it automatically. “You should eat something. You want oatmeal?”

Dean’s lips quirk, but he shakes his head.

“Dean… I worry about you, you know,” Sam says, his voice dropping to a low whisper. “You’re… I don’t know. You don’t seem well.”

Dean takes a deep breath, then another, then carefully puts his cup down and the cookie beside it and turns to Sam. “Of course I’m not well,” he says. He stares down at the floor between his feet, at the corner of the sheet folded over his toes and trailing on the tile. “You even said that yourself. You watch me breaking and I wonder sometimes if you don’t enjoy it.”

“You need something to do,” Sam says. He doesn’t deny it, though, Dean notices. He doesn’t even bother to try.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t get out much these days,” Dean says. He finally lifts his head and locks eyes with Sam and it surprises them both a little when he catches the shine of yellow in Sam’s gaze and doesn’t back down from it. “Hell, people even take their fucking _dogs_ for walks, Sam. I’m your _brother_. Even before all of this _shit_ happened, I was your lover. I deserve something more from you than this paper dollhouse, pasted-on, flaking happiness, Pleasantville prison.”

Sam reaches out and cups Dean’s face in his hands. His eyes are still that shining ochre, but there is swirling fog beneath the surface and Dean watches it and tries not to let himself get sucked in. “Just how _pleasant_ is it?” Sam murmurs, his breath warm on Dean’s lips.

Dean closes his eyes and runs his tongue out over his mouth, tasting Sam’s breath, how familiar it lingers. When he opens them again, everything is as black and white as a turn of the century silent film.

Dean shoves Sam’s hands away from his face and backs up until the edge of the counter bites into his lower back. “Stop it, Sam,” he hisses. His eyes feel sore and heavy like he has something pressing on them and he _knows_ it’s Sam’s magic. He knows the smell of it by now. “I just want to leave this fucking apartment. For a few hours, Sam. I want to hear other voices and see things other than these walls. Just… _why_ can’t you let me go?”

“You know I can’t let you go, Dean,” Sam says. He turns back to the cookie sheet and starts taking cookies off of it and placing them on a plate. “You remember the contract? How it was signed? You know I can’t.”

“I…” Dean draws in a deep breath and lets it out with a sound of tired frustration. “I _know_ that, yeah. But, Sammy, I wouldn’t run. I _couldn’t_. I just… Please. Please. I’m going insane like this.”

Sam’s lips twitch with some inner amusement, but he doesn’t voice it. Instead, he says, “Not yet.”

“Why?” Dean presses. “ _Why_ not yet?”

Sam turns back to him and the color bleeds back into the world with his movement. The press of magic on Dean’s eyes is gone and he shakes his head a little to clear the rest away. Sam watches him and this time when he reaches out to touch him, Dean doesn’t flinch away. “Because I have powerful enemies, Dean,” Sam says. He turns his hand over to run his knuckles up and down Dean’s cheek. “Because they know I would do _anything_ to keep you and they don’t care what happens to you. If you think God or anyone is going to save you, think again. They only want you to get to me and I _will not allow that._ So you stay here. No walks. No visitors. Not even a pet. Until it’s over.”

“And when will that be?” Dean asks. He feels like his lungs are wrapped in cellophane, every breath he takes constricted by plastic wrap.

Sam shakes his head and lets his hand drop back to his side. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’ll be… when it is.”

Dean stares at him in silence for a few minutes then drops his gaze back to the tile floor by his feet. “Great,” he says. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Do what everyone else does; watch T.V.,” Sam says. He shrugs and reaches over Dean’s shoulder for a coffee cup.

“I don’t like T.V. anymore,” Dean says. “There’s nothing to see but more and more shit about this… ‘End of Days’. That’s what they’re calling it, you know. ‘The End of Days’. It’s very Revelations.”

“Or very Schwarzenegger,” Sam says. “It’s funny, their own book says ‘no one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’, but they think they know.”

Dean chuffs soft, humorless laughter and glances up at Sam through his lashes. “You know what they say about scripture, don’t you, Sammy?”

Sam smiles and leans back against the counter, arms crossed over his chest. “They say a lot of things. Which in particular are you talking about?”

“Even the devil can do it,” Dean whispers. “That’s what they say. Even the devil can quote scripture if it suits his purpose.”

Sam throws his head back and laughs, full and deep and amused. “Oh, I’m flattered,” he says. He puts his hand out and catches the back of Dean’s neck in one cupped hand, drawing him toward him. “The devil,” he murmurs, lowering his head to brush his lips over Dean’s. “Those same people… ones that think they’re so clever when they say things like that… they forget… the devil was once God’s most beloved angel. Of course he can quote scripture.”

Dean’s breath catches and he watches Sam’s lips form the words as they leave his mouth. He runs his tongue over his teeth and rolls his eyes up to meet Sam’s gaze. “What’s your excuse, Sammy?”

Sam grins. “Maybe there’s a little fallen angel in all of us,” he says. “And _birth_ is our fall from grace.”

Dean swallows. ‘You don’t believe that,” he says.

Sam’s smile widens slowly. “No,” he says quietly.

There’s a knock at the door—the main door—and they both look up. Sam’s lips have drawn back from his teeth and Dean stares at him. It’s gone after only an instant, but he still saw it. The reaction must have been an unconscious one, he thinks. He hopes.

Sam nudges him with something in his hand and Dean looks down. It’s a pack of Camel cigarettes. He had forgotten that he asked Sam to get them. He takes them and pulls the sheet up to his chest as Sam goes to answer the door.

When Pascal walks into the kitchen with an imp clinging like a tiny monkey to his coat sleeve, Dean desperately wishes to sink through the floor. Grow wings to fly. Evaporate like water. Anything to get away from him.

Pascal runs his eyes over Dean standing there in his sheet like it’s a long ball gown coming apart at the seams, then smiles, flashing his sharp teeth, and takes a cookie off the plate on the counter. “How are things, Winchester?” he asks.

Dean chews his bottom lip and seeks out Sam with his eyes. Sam’s in the other room getting dressed to go out with Pascal. He either doesn’t know anything is wrong or doesn’t care. Dean highly suspects the latter, but then maybe he’s just feeling uncharitable.

There is a gentle plucking at the sheet by Dean’s arm and he looks down to find the little imp has stretched out its arm and snatched at it. He makes a soft distressed sound and forces himself not to smack the creature away from him. Dean’s seen imps like it before. They’re the kind that fit in bottles and grant wishes and they’re essentially harmless. Of course, that didn’t make his skin crawl any less when the thing stared at him with its big lantern eyes and smiled with teeth like a newborn baby.

“Birth is our fall from grace,” Dean mutters to himself. He shudders and scoots away from Pascal and his pet. “ _Sam_.”

“His name’s Frank,” Pascal tells Dean, chewing a chunk of his chocolate chip cookie. He breaks a small piece of it off and offers it to the imp, who takes it and gets chocolate goo on its sharp little fingers.

Dean thinks of tacky, almost dry blood and represses the sudden urge to gag. “That is not its name,” he says instead.

“Well, no,” Pascal says. He shrugs and strokes a finger down the back of the imp’s ridged, scaled little spine. It arches into the caress like a cat and Dean looks away, disgusted. “His real name was Franwrok when I bought him. I like Frank better.”

Dean looks between Pascal and his imp and can’t decide which of them he likes less. The imp gives him the creeps, but he has _reasons_ to hate Pascal. More than just because he gives him icky feelings in his tummy. “ _Sam_.”

“Relax, Winchester, I’m going,” Pascal says. He picks Frank’s little taloned fingers out of the sheet and walks out of the kitchen with the creature watching Dean over his shoulder, sucking sugary crumbs from under his fingernails. “Samuel, are you decent?” Pascal calls ahead of himself as he walks into the bedroom/living room to find him. “And by ‘decent’, I mean are you ready to get the fuck out of here? I do believe I frighten your brother. Can’t imagine why.”

Dean hears Sam’s soft chuckling laughter in the other room and squeezes his eyes closed. In his hand, his pack of cigarettes is crushed and tobacco flakes fall like tiny autumn leaves to the tile floor.

~~*~~

Dean watched Sam kill his first angel only hours after Sam took him back. They were in another motel, just for the night, Sam said, and Sam left Dean to go take a shower. Dean was in shock and didn’t know what to think or do or even what to feel, so he sat in the middle of one of the beds and did his best to feel nothing, do nothing, and think nothing.

It helped. A little.

He was listening to the water rain down in the shower and rocking himself as he hummed softly under his breath. He kept thinking about Sam and his shining yellow eyes, his hand on his hand around the knife that killed him, the way his body twined like vines and smoke around Pascal’s… All these things he tried so hard to not think of were the things he couldn’t banish from his mind.

He was playing memory Russian roulette with those very thoughts when a hand touched his shoulder and Dean jerked. He bit his knuckle to keep from screaming, but he must have made some noise because when he locked gazes with the angel standing there by the bed, the angel shook his head and held a finger to his mouth for silence.

“Come with me,” the angel said.

Dean cocked his head and frowned. “I don’t know you,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper when the creature darted his eyes to the bathroom door. The water was still running, but that didn’t really mean anything. “He’s in the shower,” Dean said, then felt kind of stupid for stating the obvious. “What do you want?”

“Someone sent me for you,” the angel said.

“For what?” Dean asked. He chewed at a hangnail on the side of his thumb and stared at the angel with suspicion. “I can’t leave.”

“You can do whatever you want,” the angel said. His lips twitched in a slight little smile. “Free will, remember? A… brother of mine tells me you’re very fond of the idea.”

“Free will,” Dean muttered. He glanced at the bathroom door, then away. He thought of dog’s teeth in the back of his shoulder and shuddered. “There’s a contract,” he told the angel. “Signed in blood.”

“So what?” the angel said. He put out his hand to Dean, palm up in offering. “Take my hand. There are loop-holes in every contract, Dean Winchester.”

Dean noticed he was rocking, but didn’t try to make himself stop. It was nice. It comforted him.

He looked at the bathroom door again and frowned. Sam was taking a long time in the shower.

“Dean,” the angel said.

Dean’s eyes shot to him and he pulled his legs up to wrap his arms around them. “Maybe I’m where I want to be,” he said.

The angel reached for him again and the bathroom door opened. Sam stood there for a moment, eyes black and shining like pools of oil and then he shook his head, dashing water from his hair. “Castiel doesn’t come in person anymore?” Sam asked. “Who are you?”

“My name is not important,” the angel said. He put his hand on Dean’s shoulder again, his other hand still offered for him to take. “Come with me. Take my hand.”

Dean shook his head and scrambled back from the angel until he had his back to the headboard. He looked from the creature to Sam, then down to the garish flower print of the coverlet as he continued to chew at his thumb. He had his hangnail bleeding, but didn’t seem to notice.

“You heard him,” Sam said, walking into the room naked and dripping water. He moved like a stalking cat and the thought had the hair at the back of Dean’s neck standing up. “He’s where he wants to be.”

“He thinks that now,” the angel said.

“He’ll think it later too,” Sam said, fairly snarling it at him as he advanced on the angel.

The angel stood his ground and tried to look calm and unconcerned, but he kept brushing at invisible lint on his coat and couldn’t seem to find a place to rest his hands. Nervous habits that belonged only to humans and those who had been in the bodies and minds of humans for too long—or angels that were too afraid to curb the instincts of their human bodies.

“I’m giving you one chance,” Sam said softly as he stopped less than two feet from the angel, his body language screaming that he wanted to kill the creature, every movement making Dean more and more agitated. “I would take this chance, while I’m still capable of mercy, and get the fuck out of here before I kill you.”

“Do you truly believe yourself incapable of mercy, Sam Winchester?” the angel asked, and he sounded truly curious to know. “ _All_ things are capable of mercy.”

Sam snarled like an enraged animal and pounced on the angel. Dean pressed himself back against the headboard and watched with wide eyes as Sam tumbled with the angel, crawled over it, then started to… rip it apart. His hands were like hundreds of knives, like he had suddenly sprouted razors on the tips of his fingers, and he shredded the human skin that the angel inhabited while it shrieked until there was no tongue or throat with which to make the sound. It didn’t fall silent, it just lost human means of verbalization—Dean could still hear its terror and yes, at the last, its _rage_ as it was forcefully shed of its mortal body.

Sam skinned the angel of its stolen humanity, then reached inside of its bones and found the angel, there, twined in lights like terrified fireflies, and he wrapped his fingers in its soul and dragged it out. He held it up and examined it, the way it glowed and flowed like liquid, silver, prism glass roots, all going back to a circular shape before reaching out again. Ripped too soon from the body it had lived in, the soul still sought out the familiar reassurance of nerves, vessels, cells, and acids.

“All things may be capable of mercy,” Sam whispered, watching it with blank onyx demon eyes. “ _Capable_ , perhaps. But not everything is inclined toward it.”

As the translucent finger-like vines came back together and wrapped around each other, forming a pulsing, glowing orb in Sam’s hand, Sam closed his fingers around it and squeezed. Dean watched with a sob caught in his throat as Sam’s arm flexed and the soft light died and was crushed. Sam opened his hand and moved his fingers, fine dusty powder falling to the floor and Dean was at last able to close his eyes before he started to scream.

~~*~~

Dean sits all day in the middle of the bed and prays. He hasn’t prayed in a very, very long time and it feels weird at first, but he gets used it. After a while, sitting there in his sheet with Sam’s smell still on him and the shadows running across the walls, it’s almost like talking to himself. The only difference is, talking to himself; he gets an answer when he wants one.

He doesn’t really know what he expected from the Almighty Asshole anyway. Maybe advice, maybe permission, hell, maybe all he really wants is to feel that little tickle of _something_ in the back of his mind that used to make him think somewhere out there, there was some god that knew him. What he got was a lot of nothing and a massive headache.

So he’s right back where he always is. Even knowing with a certainty that few _pious_ people ever have, beyond any doubt whatsoever that there is indeed a God—yes, that one—he is left making up his own mind because God, as omnipotent and omnipresent as he is said to be, is one lazy self-serving motherfucker.

Dean still hasn’t made up his mind about what he’s going to do when Sam returns with Pascal just before sunset.

Dean is sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in his sheet, shivering, undecided and a little mentally scattered around the edges when Sam walks over to him and tosses something at his feet. He jumps and scoots back on the bed, looking between Sam and Pascal and the thing on the floor.

“Happy un-birthday,” Pascal says. He grins and strokes Frank’s spine. The imp butts his head against the side of the demon’s neck.

“That’s supposed to be my line, isn’t it?” Sam asks.

“Oh, ‘scuse me,” Pascal says and gestures invitingly to Dean. “You say it then.”

“No, I think you kind of… stole my thunder,” Sam says. His lips quirk in a little smile of amusement.

“Well, if that’s all the thunder you had to offer, what good are you?” Pascal says.

Sam snorts and rolls his eyes.

Dean swallows and looks over the edge of the mattress at his ‘gift’. He squints and as he looks, the dark shape starts to make sense until he understands that he is looking at _wings_. Very large wings, though they are folded as though the animal they had belonged to had been roosting when they were taken from its body.

“Sam?” Dean says. He licks his lips and looks up at Sam, determinedly ignoring Pascal. He doesn’t think the demon will ever stop making his skin crawl and he hates Sam just a little for becoming friends with him. “Sam… what is that?”

Sam crouches down on his heels in front of the wings and looks Dean in the eyes from his own level. “Look closer,” he says. “You tell me.”

Dean narrows his eyes again and tilts his head, then tentatively reaches out to touch them. His fingertips run down one feather and when it shifts, the light hits it just right and brilliant color flashes from the black wings. They are more brilliant than peacock feathers. They are like the wings of peacocks after it has rained gold and silver and left beads of that brilliant water caught in the fibers of each feather. They are like darkness, dipped in liquid moonlight, strung with the light of a thousand dying stars.

“Angel wings,” Dean whispers. He looks up at Sam with wonder and sadness, then moves away from them, back onto the bed. “Whose?”

“Which angel?” Sam asks. He stands up from the floor and walks around the bed to sit by Dean.

“That’s the best part,” Pascal says. Dean shoots him a frightened look and edges closer to Sam. “You’ll love the irony. Tell him, Sam.”

Dean very much doubts he is going to _love_ it. Pascal looks like the cat that got the cream and also happened to find a drowned mouse at the bottom of the bowl. Dean shakes his head. Stupid analogy, but he looks so fucking _smug_ , that can’t possibly be a good thing.

He looks to Sam for an answer. Sam hesitates, and in that moment of hesitation, Dean loves him so much that it really does hurt. “Castiel,” Sam says. “It was Castiel this time, Dean.”

Pascal is grinning and says something about Dean’s ‘guardian angel’, then laughs to himself, but Dean isn’t paying any attention. He blinks at Sam, a slow lowering of his lashes, the expression one of quiet surprise. “So?” he says after a moment.

It’s Sam’s turn to do the slow blink. “I… don’t know. You knew him. Sometimes that makes a difference.”

Dean shakes his head and frowns. “I knew Ruby, didn’t I?’ he says. “I didn’t really give a shit when she died. Why would I care about this?”

Sam shrugs. “You didn’t like Ruby much.”

Dean smiles a little and unconsciously reaches out to push the hair back from Sam’s ear. “I didn’t like Castiel much either.”

“Well, shit,” Pascal says. Dean looks at him and his eyebrows lift. Pascal looks almost like he’s pouting. “Well, I don’t know,” he says defensively. “The least you could do is cry about it. Just a little?”

Dean makes a scoffing sound in his throat. “No.”

“Fine,” Pascal says. The imp has crawled up into his hair and watches Dean from his perch atop his head until Pascal swats at it to get down. “Fine,” he mutters again. “Ruin my fun.”

Dean turns his eyes back to Sam as he pets his fingers through his hair. His fingers catch on something and he lifts his hand to untangle it and finds blood dried in Sam’s hair to a thick, dark crust. His stomach turns over and he snatches his hand away. “Sammy… you have blood in your hair.”

Sam rolls his eyes up to look at his hair, which has fallen into his face a little, then lifts one of his hands to show Dean the way his arms are stained red almost to his elbows. “Yeah,” he says.

Sam leans over like he’s going to kiss Dean and Dean leans a little back, just out of his reach. Distantly, he hears Pascal mutter, “Get a fucking room,” under his breath, which strikes him as just a little ridiculous.

“Do you want me to go wash?” Sam asks.

Dean can feel Sam’s breath on his lips and the desire to lean toward him is right there, but he nods his head and leans back more instead, out of his reach. “Please.”

Without a word, Sam gets up from the bed and walks by Pascal, down the hall to the bathroom. As they pass, Dean notices that Pascal is has about an inch on his abnormally tall brother and for some reason, it makes him think of Pascal’s freakishly long legs. Then he thinks of Sam and Pascal wrapped around each other like fucking hyenas and it all just kind of snowballs from there until he pulls his legs up and hides his face against the backs of his thighs.

“He died of _unnatural_ causes, you know,” Pascal says. Dean jumps when Pascal nudges the angel wings with the toe of his boot and peers up at him. “So how is life treating you these days, Winchester? Have you missed Harvey?”

Dean makes a strained sound in his throat and shakes his head. “Leave me alone,” he whispers.

“That’s too bad,” Pascal says. “He’s missed you.”

Dean glances at the entryway into the hall where Sam disappeared and without thinking about it, starts to gently rock himself. He can hear water running and he listens for it to stop and hopes that Pascal will go away or at the very least just please _shut the fuck up_ , but it’s Pascal so of course he doesn’t.

“So how is it, really?” Pascal asks. “Is there trouble here in Paradise?”

“Shut up,” Dean says, his eyes snapping to Pascal and going sharp.

“Ooh, a nerve there, huh?” Pascal says. “A touchy subject, is it?”

Frank the imp is on Pascal’s shoulder and as Pascal leans down to hiss his bullshit in Dean’s face, he reaches out with his spindly little fingers and grazes the tips of his fingernails down Dean’s cheek. Dean jerks away and swats at him and the creature scurries like an injured spider into Pascal’s hair to hide, peeking out at him.

“Leave me alone,” Dean says, mumbling it to the backs of his legs as he hides his face again.

“What is it you do up here all day anyway, Winchester?” Pascal says. His voice is closer, almost in Dean’s ear, and Dean can feel the way the mattress gives as Pascal braces one arm on it and leans close. “Chained to this bed with only ten feet of give in any direction… you can’t even reach the bathroom. How do you shit? What do you do to occupy your time while your dearest brother love is out murdering the holy flock?” Pascal runs his tongue over the shell of Dean’s ear and Dean has to bite his bottom lip to keep from screaming for Sam. “Do you think of me sometimes when you masturbate?”

Dean’s head comes up and his eyes flare with feverish anger. “Only when I think about Sam doing the things to you that you did to me,” Dean snaps. “Except _you_ probably enjoy that sick shit, don’t you?”

Pascal blinks at him, then laughs and stands up, shaking his head. “Is _that_ what you think?” he asks. He runs a hand through his hair, still laughing a little and gives Dean a half amused, half pitying look. “First, let me be clear about one thing, Winchester. _No one_ fucks me.”

At the disbelieving look Dean gives him, Pascal just smirks. “Yes, that’s right,” he says. “And the one and only time I fucked your brother, you had front row seats, as I’m sure you’ll recall if you just give it a minute.”

“I don’t believe you,” Dean says. He wants to, though. He wants to believe him very badly because the idea that Sam has been leaving him chained to his bed to go roll across whatever horizontal surface demons typically fuck on with _Pascal_ has been eating him alive inside. But he doesn’t believe it for a moment. “Sam… Sam’s great, but I don’t care how fantastic he is, no one’s going to make a trade like that for one single dirty fuck on the floor.”

Pascal chuffs soft laughter. “Your brother’s hot, no lie,” he says, speaking slowly as though measuring each word before it leaves his mouth, “and really, _really_ great in bed—or on the floor, as the case may be—but I… don’t… know… what… you… are… talking about.”

Dean scowls at him and inches away from him as Pascal leans over him again. “I’m talking about Sam trading himself for me,” Dean says. “I’m talking about you and my brother all over each other like rabid animals. Like you said; I saw it.”

Pascal does that surprised, slow blinking thing, then he starts to laugh. “You… you think… ? Oh, sweet jumped up Jesus. You think that’s what happened? That I what? Traded my right to you for one fuck from your little brother?” Pascal leans on his hand on the bed and laughs a little with his head down. He holds up his other hand when Dean starts to speak and shakes his head. “Give me a minute. For fuck’s sake, Winchester, that has got to be one of the… stupidest damn things I think I have ever heard. Excepting several convoluted lines of horseshit written in red in that holy scripture of yours, that is. But this is… well, it ranks up there anyway.”

“You’re lying,” Dean says, staring at Pascal over the tops of his knees.

In the bathroom, the water turns off and Dean looks toward the hall.

“Am I?” Pascal says, drawing his attention back. “Do you really think so?”

“I really think so,” Dean says. “You’re a _liar_.”

Pascal chuckles and reaches for Dean’s face. Dean draws back but he’s just a little too slow. Pascal catches his face in his hands and presses his thumbs over his eyelids. “I do not lie,” he whispers in Dean’s ear and Dean’s vision swirls with light behind his closed eyelids.

When it stops, he’s dizzy and in a room lit with candlelight. It’s not a room he’s ever seen before and the candles are everywhere. It reminds him of a scene from a B horror movie set in some old cathedral. There are pillar candles, candelabra, single candles in holders and short little candles melting wax in glossy ropes straight to the floor. The light moves and everywhere there are shadows. It’s disturbing to the eyes and sometimes the shadows don’t look so much like a trick of the light. They almost look like sentient things, independent of the light.

Dean wants to slink away from this place and get away but he can’t move. His body doesn’t obey him when he tells it to flee, it just stands there and he feels like he’s waiting for something.

Then he turns his head—except he hasn’t told his head to turn, it just does it—and he sees Sam standing beside him. He has time to think that Sam looks horrible; gaunt and tired, maybe a little pissed off, then he hears a footstep echo against the walls and turns his head to look—again without his volition.

A man steps into the candlelight, the darkness sliding away from him as though reluctant to let him go, and stands there before Sam, looking him over as though weighing him in his mind… and finding him wanting. He’s thin and not very tall, his face is _pretty_ for a man’s, pale with large blue eyes, high cheekbones, surrounded by shaggy dark hair and the up-turned collar of his long black coat. He is just shy of being androgynous in his beauty and he almost looks frail… until Dean _really_ looks into those eyes. There is nothing frail there. There is nothing but deep, dark, alluring _power_ in that gaze, and he’s drawn to it, though it’s not even directed at him.

As they wait for him to speak, it’s like he’s waiting for Sam to do the same and Dean gets the impression that he is perfectly willing to wait a very _long_ time. The man carries the patience of ages on his shoulders like a mantle.

“Lucifer?” Sam asks, and with that one word and the replying nod of the man in the coat, a lot of Dean’s questions are answered.

“Samuel Winchester,” Lucifer says. He smiles faintly and something hiding in his hair peeks out around the collar of his coat. “You asked for this meeting. What is it that you want?”

“Just like that?” Sam says. He sounds surprised and a little suspicious.

Lucifer’s smile widens ever so slightly and he cocks his head a bit to one side. The action puts Dean in mind of a carrion eating rook and inside the body that will not obey him, he shivers. “Allow me to rephrase,” Lucifer says. “Tell me what you want. I will then tell you if you can have it—assuming, of course, that it is within my power to give it.”

“Of course,” Sam says dryly.

Lucifer merely blinks at him from eyes as wise and unconcerned as those of a lazy house cat. “Well?”

“You already know what I want,” Sam says.

“Perhaps,” Lucifer says. “Perhaps I do. But you see, things have a way of getting ever so tedious down here and I do enjoy a good story.”

Sam appears to fight with himself about something for a while. His hands are clenched at his sides, his lip quivers before he bites down on it to make it stop, and he closes his eyes for a few seconds and looks like he is counting or praying. When he opens them again, he seems to have gotten himself under control. “I want Dean.”

“Ah, I see,” Lucifer says. He lifts one hand without moving his eyes from Sam and runs his fingers into the collar of his coat to pet whatever’s moving there. “I do not hold that particular contract, as I’m sure you know,” he says, flicking his eyes toward Dean.

“I have asked _him_ already,” Sam says. His tone up until now has been less than respectful and at times he’s seemed like he’s been controlling himself from being outright rude, but now Dean hears a slight note of pleading enter his voice. “He refused.”

“To do what?” Lucifer asks. “And do be specific.”

“He refused to give him to me,” Sam says, perplexed.

“To _give_ him to you?” Lucifer says. “Child… as he’s one of my demons and a dear friend, I should be rather disappointed in him were he to just _give_ to you anything out of the goodness of his soiled heart.”

“I…” Sam licks his lips and glances at Dean, then back at Lucifer. “I don’t understand.”

“Demon hunter,” Lucifer says, chiding. “ _Think_.”

Sam stares at him quietly for a minute and something seems to click. Dean can almost see it happen. “I don’t have anything he wants.”

“Now, that is just not so,” Lucifer says.

“Yes it is,” Sam says. “I’ve asked him already.”

Lucifer lifts a brow at Sam and shakes his head a little, then he puts out his arm with his hand toward Dean, palm up. “I doubt _ask_ is really what you did, but let’s not quibble,” he says, and Dean feels a little thrill of shock when the little imp, Frank, scurries down Lucifer’s arm and sits in the palm of his hand, blinking at him. “If you have nothing he wants, it’s only because you don’t know the right questions to ask. But here, I’ll do you a little favor, Sam. _I_ know something he wants.”

“You want to trade me your pet for _my_ pet?”

Dean goes completely still inside this stranger’s body at the sound of the voice falling from his mouth. It’s not his voice and the words aren’t his words, but he _knows_ that voice. So intimately that sometimes he longs to deafen himself to escape it. And it hits him in an electrically jarring way that he’s inside _Pascal’s_ body. He’s seeing Pascal’s memories.

“Well, my pet is so much more… cute,” Lucifer says. He’s grinning and his bright eyes are alight with unvoiced laughter. Somewhere under the rising disgust and panic in Dean’s mind it strikes him as odd and he thinks that the entire thing looks way the fuck too prearranged to be a deal—at least not in the way Sam thinks it’s a deal.

“Alright, my lord,” Pascal says, and he puts out his hand. The imp crawls reluctantly from Lucifer’s fingers into Pascal’s hand. “We have a deal.”

There is no blinding flash of light. There is no weeping of angels. Dean tries, despite his horror, to remember _anything_ and comes up completely blank. He knew nothing of it, but for one short moment in time, he had belonged to the devil himself.

“Give him to me,” Sam whispers, his voice rough like its being forced over shattered glass and sandpaper. He’s tired and he looks it. He’s weary and Dean thinks that it might have something to do with the fire licking at his heels. “Please.”

Lucifer turns back to him and his smile is perfectly in place. It is sympathetic, but there is no generosity in him whatsoever. “And if I should do this thing that you ask?” he says. “Your blood binds you to me, yet you fight it. You must know how doomed such a thing is, Sam. You’re here, after all.”

“What do you want?” Sam says, and the weariness seeps into his voice. Dean wants to scream at him _no_. Wants to tell him not to do it, not to deal with these creatures or promise them anything. They lie and they cheat and you can never trust them. That is the very definition of their character and no one knows it more than they. But he can’t do or say anything because all of this has already happened. He can only watch and listen. “Without him…”

“’With him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life,’” Lucifer says. “Milton. Interesting fellow. He’s around here somewhere.” He gestures with one hand toward the ceiling and Sam looks up. Dean follows his gaze and there, what seems almost like miles above them, swirl little colored lights like sleepy, contented lightning bugs.

“The question isn’t what do I want,” Lucifer says, blue eyes intent on Sam’s face and faintly glowing. “The question is, when it comes right down to it… if I do this thing and give you what you want, what are you willing to do for me?”

“Anything,” Sam says and more than the word itself, it’s the absolute lack of hesitation in the answer that has Dean’s attention snapping from the fluttering doomed souls in the rafters to his brother.

Lucifer lifts his hands, slim, long-fingered hands that almost look like they have extra knuckles, and steeples them in front of his smiling mouth. “Anything,” he murmurs, then presses the tips of his thumbs to his teeth, looking pleased. “I love that. Absolutely _love_ that. Thank you, thank you.”

Sam frowns at him. “But you don’t seem… surprised,” he says.

“Oh, I’m not,” Lucifer says. “But don’t take it too hard, Sammy. I am very old.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Sam demands.

Pascal and Lucifer both laugh and Dean wants to scream.

“Hell,” Lucifer murmurs. “What the _hell_ it means, Sam… I am very old and you are very young. Yes, it really is that simple. I saw the first of your race crawl, half formed and half blind, from the muck of its creation. I placed the seed within the womb that gave birth to the first murderer. You think I do not know the face of love?” Lucifer laces his fingers together and drops his hands. “Love can do wonderful, terrible things. And you love that one like that. Love that inspires wonder and terror. Of course you will do _anything_.”

Sam shivers like fingers of ice have danced up his spine and shakes his head like he could deny it. But instead of trying, he asks, “What do you want me to do?”

“Oh, for the love of God… And do not look at me like that, boy, I loved him once.” Lucifer turns his back on Sam and paces away a little before turning back. “It’s nothing quite as terrible as you’re thinking. I don’t want you to burn cities or rape babies. All I want you to do… is all you _really_ want to do.”

Sam blinks. “What?”

“I want you to follow your instincts,” Lucifer says, fairly hissing it at him. “My mark is on you, I share blood with he whose blood is in you. You are more my creature than any walking the earth right now. And you will never be free of it. You can fight it and in the end, it will drive you mad and consume you. It will bring you right back here to me. You are wasting it all and now _you will not defy me_.”

Sam jerks and takes a frightened step back in the face of Lucifer’s sudden anger. It is cold anger, the kind that kills with aim and calculation, and it sends screaming, icy, biting things racing along Dean’s skin.

“No,” Sam manages. His head is down and he watches Lucifer from the peripheral of his vision as he rubs his arms. “No.”

“Is that no, you will not do it? Or no, you will not defy me again?” Lucifer demands.

Sam swallows and the click in his throat seems to echo in the cavernous room. “No, I will not defy you.”

“Good,” Lucifer says. “You will go back, then. You may have your heart’s want. In return, all that I demand is that you allow yourself to yield to your desires. Become the thing that I intended you to be.”

And with a sharp clarity that stabs like thin shards of glass sliding between wet lips of unresisting skin Dean can see it and how it all came together. How the light shines in the heavenly eyes of the devil, how Sam’s lips part and his breath rushes over his tongue, but he doesn’t say no, he doesn’t take it back. He sees how it was all done because of him and how the world will end in Sam’s wretched love for him. Knowing that, he watches the way the spilled oil rainbow glow of the imp Frank’s scales fan out on his fingertips and he feels Pascal’s body breathing and humming and _living_ all around him.

It’s like being trapped in abysmal dark without a light or a hold or even fingers to claw out with. He screams and he can feel the way the sound throbs against the thin skull bones of his head but no sound escapes.

Then he’s falling and the candles swirl around him as he looks for Sam and finds only the darkness with its insectile, fairy-light swirling souls as they rush toward him. Then his hands hit the carpet and he’s screaming outside of his head at last. He can hear the way his voice crashes off the walls, ceiling and the window glass, and he thinks he should stop because he might just be a little bit hysterical, but he draws in another breath and the sound goes on repeating. He has fingers now, but instead of clawing at the world, he drags himself across the floor to the bed and huddles beside it.

~~*~~

Somewhere in the room is screaming and it’s not his own. He thinks maybe it’s Pascal’s and the idea brings his head up just long enough for Dean to see the roses wrapped around the demon’s throat, the thorns of the vines piercing his skin as they squeeze, blood running down his neck to soak his shirt, and over his shoulder, Sam looks on with cold indifference.

As Dean watches, the head of a perfect rosebud touches Pascal’s panting mouth and the petals seem to caress him. It’s almost tender in a way and Dean looks away from it like he’s been caught spying on lovers.

“What did you do?” Sam asks as he walks into the room.

He doesn’t tell the roses to release him or even to gentle their hold. Dean watches the rose to see if it will slide between Pascal’s lips and slither down his throat to strangle him.

“Sam…” Pascal manages, and his normally deep, whiskey and gravel voice is like the scrape of false nails on an old chalkboard. The vine constricts once and he is silenced.

“What did you do to him?” Sam demands, coming up behind Pascal to whisper it in his ear. His head is pulled back at a painful angle by the charmed roses and even if he were not being slowly strangled, Dean isn’t sure he would be able to answer. “I have told you not to,” Sam hisses. “Do not touch, do not taunt, do not tell him anything or remind him of things best forgotten. I have told you not to endanger him. Do you _dare to defy me now_?”

Dean shrinks back from them both and presses his back so hard against the side of the bed, he can feel the railing biting into his ribs.

“Look at that,” Sam snaps, gesturing at Dean with one hand. “You’ve scared him.” He shakes his head and waves a hand at the rose. “Let him go.”

The enchanted thing hesitates, winding around Pascal’s throat with hungry desire, but in the end, it obeys and releases the demon to slither back to its window.

Pascal sucks in breath in shuddering gulps and falls to his knees on the floor. “Thank you,” he says softly.

“They would not have touched you if you had not harmed him,” Sam says, pacing around Pascal. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Pascal says. He jerks away from Sam and throws his hand up at the snarling sound that Sam makes at his answer.

Dean blinks and looks at his brother, half expecting to see his mouth full of dog teeth. There’s nothing like that, though. Only Sam, pissed off and circling Pascal like a caged tiger that’s been poked one too many times with a stick.

“He is not wounded,” Sam says. “I would smell it on him if he were. You did something else. Tell me what it is and don’t lie or I’ll feed your sorry fucking carcass to my flowers.”

“I gave him a memory,” Pascal whispers. He’s rubbing his throat and there’s a dark red mark there like a collar. “The day you bought him.”

Sam turns on him and bares his teeth. Rage rolls off of him like a swarm of bees and he lashes out, catching Pascal on the jaw with a heavy blow that rocks his head back and almost sends him flat to the floor. “Get out,” Sam says, growling it through his teeth.

Pascal works his jaw and there’s a crunching sound in the room that makes Dean wince. It sounds painful, but Pascal shows no sign of hurt. He gets slowly to his feet, keeping his cautious attention on Sam and goes around him to the door. “He was going to find out,” Pascal says when he opens the door. He stands there for a while, looking between them, and he seems puzzled. “But if it matters, I thought he knew.”

“Don’t try to pretend you did that for any other reason than to fuck with his head some more,” Sam says. He points out the door and lifts his brows at Pascal. “I know you. You couldn’t resist the temptation. Believe me, I know the feeling, but you save it for other people and leave this one alone.”

Pascal holds his hands up in a sign of surrender. “Alright, alright, I’m sorry,” he says.

“Sorry you got caught at it,” Sam says. “Now get the fuck out. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget. That hotel on Oak.”

“The Hilton, man,” Pascal says, rubbing his jaw. “It’s the Hilton. Damn, you hit hard.”

“Yeah, yeah, get the fuck out _now_ ,” Sam snaps. He closes his hand and the door slams and locks in Pascal’s face.

Everything is quiet for a minute. Dean listens to his own breathing and Sam’s, which is a little heavier because he’s angry. Distantly, on the other side of the door, Pascal mutters something about Sam being a fucking show-off. This makes Sam’s lips curl in a wicked-looking little grin that sends a shock of alarm through Dean’s belly.

Sam turns and sees the look of fear on Dean’s face and it slips away. He crosses the room to the bed and crouches down on his heels next to Dean. Dean looks up at him with his head down, watching Sam through his lashes, afraid to meet his eyes.

Times like these, he can feel the weight of the change in him and it shames him. He wishes he did not know how completely broken he has become, how _different_ he is now, but unfortunately, he does know. He knows how utterly he has transformed from a fierce predator into a sneaking, hiding, terrified, victimized creature. He needs no one to hold a mirror up to see exactly how low he’s fallen and it disgusts him.

Sam puts out his empty hand to touch him and _there_ is his mirror. It’s like a slap the way every touch of those beloved hands reminds him of how strong he is not.

Dean shrinks away from him, but Sam reaches around him and pulls him to his chest. Dean doesn’t return the embrace at first, just lets Sam hold him as he listens to his heart beating against his cheek and the in and out rush of his breath. Sam runs his hands up and down Dean’s back and makes soft, throaty sounds of comfort. The vibration of a purr against the side of his neck as he nuzzles Dean to comfort. In some part of his mind, Dean wonders when Sam learned how to purr like a cat and briefly thinks about asking him how it’s done, but then a deep sob rips through him and he shudders. He puts his arms around Sam and clings to his shoulders as his body shakes.

“You did that… this… all of _this_ for me,” Dean says, speaking into Sam’s shirt. Sam’s skin is newly washed and still moist from his shower, but Dean can smell the sweat of Sam’s heat under the perfume of the soap and burrows into it. “How could you?”

“I did it for me, too,” Sam whispers into Dean’s hair. He presses his lips to Dean’s forehead as he speaks, pressing each word into his skin, right out through his skull to where his spine is most vulnerable. “I did it for me, too. How could I _not_?”

Sam strokes his hands down Dean’s back once more, then sits back and pulls Dean with him, half lifting him, half coaxing him upright. “Come on,” Sam says, and he’s being so gentle. Dean hides his face against his shoulder and stands, holding onto him like he needs Sam to remain standing. “Come on. Let me give you a bath.”

“I don’t need a bath,” Dean says. It’s a weak protest, though and he’s already going with Sam down the hall to the bathroom as he utters it. “I’m not dirty.”

“No,” Sam says. He pushes the door open and makes Dean sit down on the toilet seat, then turns to kneel by the large claw-foot bathtub. “I want to do it anyway. Just… stay there. Just let me, alright?”

Dean blinks at him and tilts his head to one side, studying him with weary curiosity. It’s not often that Sam _asks_. Not for a long time. It’s the asking more than anything else that makes Dean want to let him.

“Alright,” Dean says.

It’s a little cold in the bathroom, despite the fact that Sam took a hot shower only a few minutes earlier and there is steam on the mirror. He stands up and goes over to wipe it off, then stares into the glass at his reflection, watching goosebumps rise on his own skin and behind him, Sam’s back as he reaches out to turn off the water.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, coming up behind him. He lays his hands on Dean’s shoulders and works his fingers a little. “He shouldn’t have showed that to you.”

Dean watches his face in the mirror and allows his eyes to unfocus until his own features become shapes without attachment or emotion. The person staring back at him so intently isn’t himself, they don’t even matter. Like the false slip photocopies inside brand new picture frames on the shelf in a store. Real, yet false in representation.

Sam is just a shape hovering in the background. The bad idea being whispered in his ear.

Then Sam kisses his shoulder and Dean blinks. His vision sharpens and he takes a step back from the mirror before turning around and moving into the pull of Sam’s hands.

“I’m sorry,” Dean whispers. He shivers as he steps into the bathtub and sits down in the warm water. Sam cups water in his hand and sloshes it up Dean’s leg, but Dean catches his hand and holds it still. “I’m sorry, Sammy.”

“For what?” Sam asks. He takes his hand from Dean and reaches for the bar of Ivory soap. He lathers it in his hand, then starts to work the suds over Dean’s legs, up his ribs and belly. “You didn’t do anything.”

Dean makes a soft, almost startling sound of humorless laughter and shakes his head. “You’re wrong. I did so much,” Dean says. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Sam says, and the way he says it defines a clear difference between _why_ and _what for_. “Why are you sorry, Dean?”

Dean thinks about it. He takes a deep breath, holds it and thinks. “I don’t know,” he says after a while.

Sam smiles and slides his soapy hands up Dean’s chest and down his arms. “Maybe that’s okay,” he says. “Maybe try to let it be.”

Dean nods and rolls his head back against the side of the tub as Sam reaches for a wash cloth and begins to smooth it over his skin. He works the soap into it, then wipes at Dean’s arms and shoulders until Dean sighs and slides down in the water to relax. He closes his eyes as Sam moves around the tub to crouch behind him and shampoo his hair, and sits up when Sam presses against his back to urge him up so he can rinse it away.

When they’re done, Sam pulls the plug and Dean sits there, playing his fingers through the swirls as the water drains away. Only when it’s gone does he let Sam help him to stand.

Sam starts to dry him too, but Dean takes the thick towel from him and does it himself, watching Sam under the terrycloth as he ruffles it over his head. He watches the way Sam’s eyes have gone dark and feels how his heartbeat thumps in his throat and his skin flushes the goosebumps away.

Want hasn’t always been so easy between them. Dean still remembers a time when they hesitated to touch in certain ways and thought it decadent. Kisses taken in shame. Boney fingers licked under a broken light. Those memories now only make him smile sadly as he reaches out to run his hand up the back of Sam’s neck, fingers threaded through his hair to feel the damp strands on his clammy fingers. He almost wishes he could feel that aching shame again as he lets Sam take him to the bed and lay him down. It’s kind of like wishing he was dying.

Sam lays him back on the bed and licks the tiny lingering drops of water from Dean’s navel as he pulls at his shirt. He lifts his head only long enough to yank the shirt over his head and send it flying, then he’s crawling up Dean’s body, licking his way to his mouth, whispering soft Latin under his breath that sound a lot like spells for killing angels.

Dean reaches out and catches the back of Sam’s neck, pulling him close as Sam’s lips curve into a slow smile. He murmurs his strange incantations against Dean’s lips as Dean kisses him and the words distort under their tongues.

“ _Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum_ ,” Dean murmurs, nipping at Sam’s mouth.

Sam laughs softly and lifts his head. “No one speaks Latin anymore,” he whispers. He’s teasing, but part of him is also serious.

“You do,” Dean says back. He smiles back at him, tired and unrepentant about it.

“Sometimes,” Sam says. He runs the back of his hand down Dean’s side, knuckles tripping over his ribs, pressing, almost bruising along his waist, into the point of his hip. “You read too much,” Sam murmurs. He grips Dean’s hip in one hand to tilt his hips up as he moves against him and pets the fingers of the other through his wet hair. “Where in the world did you get a bible? And who’s been teaching you Latin?”

Dean tips his head back into Sam’s hand and his heart is beating so strong in his throat that Sam can watch the way his skin moves over it. _Bump, bump, bump_. “No one,” Dean says. Sam digs his fingers into his hip and growls softly. He grazes his teeth along the line of Dean’s throat and Dean shivers from it, but he shakes his head and stares him right in the eyes. “No one,” he says again. “Look what you are, Sammy. But don’t forget… what we _were_. I know things. You’re not the only one that knows things.”

“No,” Sam says. He lets his fingers slide through Dean’s wet hair, down his neck until he’s cupping the base of his throat. The pulse there beats fast, faster, thick and a little afraid. “’Face to face’,” he hisses. “’Now I know in part…’ Turn over.”

Dean blinks at him and frowns, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion. “Sam… don’t.”

“Don’t?” Sam says. He trails his tongue down Dean’s throat, swipes it into the deep hollow where the skin is so thin over the beating of his heart and he tastes water mingled with his brother’s sweat. “What is it you think I intend to do?”

“I don’t care what you _intend_ to do,” Dean says. He pushes himself up a little on his elbows and looks down at Sam. He watches the way Sam’s tongue flattens over his right nipple and then curls around it before he draws it into his mouth to suck. Dean moans and draws his bottom lip between his teeth, but he resists when Sam pushes at his hip to get him to roll over. “Please don’t.”

“Please don’t _what_?” Sam asks, but his eyes shine with amusement as well as arousal and Dean thinks he knows very well _what_.

Dean puts his hand out and lays it on Sam’s shoulder. He works his fingers over the slide of muscle under the warm skin, up into the tips of his hair, petting. “Don’t take me like that,” he says, voice soft, face a little flushed with embarrassment. “I don’t want to look at the wall or the headboard or the blankets. Not right now.”

“What do you want?” Sam asks. He catches Dean’s nipple in his teeth and lightly tugs, drawing a startled sound of pleasure from him. “What do you need right now?”

“I _need_ you,” Dean says, the words falling out of his mouth before he can think about them. An accident, but still true.

Sam grins at him and pulls his hands down Dean’s sides, marveling a little at the way his bones press against his palms a little more than they used to. “Alright,” he says. “You have me. What would you have _of_ me?”

“You,” Dean says honestly. He draws one leg up and presses his knee to Sam’s side, pushes his leg back down so it slides along his thigh.

“On your back or mine?” Sam asks, dropping his head to lick behind Dean’s ear and hide a smile.

Dean pulls his hands down Sam’s back, dragging his nails a little, then spreads his fingers out and slips his hands under the waistband of Sam’s pants. Sam chuckles low against Dean’s ear, his breath hot and moist on his skin, and rolls his hips, grinding against him into the grasping tug of his hands on his ass.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dean pants. He wraps his legs around Sam’s waist and lifts his hips, arching into the pleasurable grinding friction of denim against him. “Doesn’t… Mine. Yours. Both? Can we try both?”

Sam laughs and shifts to sit back on the bed, Dean spread out over his thighs. He drops a quick biting kiss to Dean’s soft belly and then he’s breathing into his flesh as he works his zipper down and pushes his jeans down his hips. “Yeah, we’ll try both,” he murmurs.

Sam runs the tip of his index finger down the crack of Dean’s ass and grins when he catches his breath. He pushes the tip of his finger inside Dean’s body and waits, watching him as his body tightens around it. Sam can feel the muscle pressing against the back of his fingernail and twists his finger a little, pushing it deeper. “But maybe not at once?”

“No,” Dean agrees. “No, not… Oh. Oh, it burns.” He squirms at the small pain as though to get away even as he reaches out and catches Sam’s shoulder to hold onto him and pull him closer.

“I could make it happen, if you want,” Sam whispers, working his finger in and out of Dean’s ass as Dean shudders and tenses. He moves over Dean, holding his weight off of him with one arm on the bed, and watches his face as he fingers him. “Haven’t you ever wondered… what it would be like to be in two places all at once?”

Dean can hear the temptation leaking into Sam’s low voice and shakes his head no even as he bucks his hips up. The idea alone kind of makes his eyes cross. “No, I just…”

Dean moans and runs his tongue over his dry lips, catching the bottom one in his teeth and biting down as Sam opens his fingers, making it burn more. He feels Sam’s tongue running along the crease of his mouth, over his teeth and lets go of his lip to lift his head and kiss him. A sound in Sam’s throat hums in his mouth and Dean’s breath hitches. He puts a hand to Sam’s chest and gently pushes him back, breaking the kiss.

Sam licks the corner of his mouth and watches Dean with a thoughtful, considering expression. The look of him like that puts Dean in mind of a cat about to bite his head off and he coughs out a breathless laugh. Sam grins back at him and pulls his fingers out of him as he hooks an arm around his waist and lifts him up. His head is bent and he’s licking at Dean’s chest, running his tongue into his bellybutton, nipping at it lightly when he pushes his cock inside him.

Dean cries out at the suddenness and force of that first thrust and tenses, fingers scrabbling at Sam’s arms and shoulders. Sam laughs with his mouth pressed to Dean’s belly and goes on licking at him lightly with his warm tongue, soothing as he rolls his hips, pushing in, pushing deeper. Dean hears the catches in his own breath and the soft curses hissed through his teeth and in a distant way, he’s embarrassed by it. That Sam can do this to him even now. Even more distantly, he thinks maybe he knows why that is.

“I love you,” Dean whispers, speaking it fiercely into Sam’s skin, thinking maybe he won’t hear it that way.

“I know,” Sam says, and he lifts his head just high enough to look up the length of Dean’s body through the hair that’s fallen in front of his eyes. “I know you do.”

Dean puts a hand out and cups Sam’s jaw, presses his fingers into his cheek a little trying to urge him up. Sam follows it and comes to him, sliding up Dean’s body until they’re flush against each other, their stomachs sliding together in the sweat building on their bodies, their muscles moving over each other, the fine hairs on their bodies tangling. Sam kisses him as he fucks him, stroking his tongue into his mouth, sucking at it until Dean’s pulse feels like it’s going to build an escape hatch and fly out of his throat, thrusting into him with slow, steady, deep strokes.

Dean nips Sam’s lips to break the kiss and draw in a deep breath. Sam nips him back, then runs his teeth down the tendon in the side of Dean’s neck as he skims his hand down his side to grab his thigh and push his leg up. He thrusts once and Dean makes a startled, half-swallowed wailing sound that pleases Sam enough to try for it again.

Dean cries out and brings his other leg up to close them tight around Sam’s waist. Sam thrusts over his prostate and he whimpers, panting out the sounds as his skin flushes and starts to feel thick and loose with growing pleasure. Sam’s murmuring something in his ear, breath harsh and voice growling but Dean only catches a word, maybe two and doesn’t understand what he’s saying—maybe it’s in Latin—then Sam rolls them, throwing his weight to the side and carrying Dean with him.

He pushes Dean up, gripping his hips to lift him, and steadies him while Dean grabs at his shoulders and sits back on him, eyes a little wide. “Sam?”

“Move,” Sam says, and thrusts up, pressing his fingers into Dean’s hips to get him to rock.

Dean shakes his head back, throwing his hair out of his eyes, and obeys. He looks down at Sam under him, watches his face, his eyes, the flow of skin over his shoulders and chest. He moans as he starts to get that thick-skinned feeling again and moves faster, riding him. Sweat sliding down his throat tickles, cools, and he shivers, then gasps as Sam sits up to lick it away. He wraps his arms around Sam’s shoulders to keep him there and Sam doesn’t shove him off, just goes from licking to sucking to lightly biting.

Dean’s head falls back, baring his throat to Sam’s tongue and teeth and there over the bed are the mounted wings of the angel, Castiel. They gleam in the dark of the room with a rainbow sheen like oil in a gutter and Dean thinks about how bright they were when the now dead heavenly creature wore them. With the heat of grace in his divine blood, they were different. Like the untarnished armor of a young soldier. Like this, with the last light of the sun fading from the sky outside the windows and sliding through the feathers and down the wall, casting patterns of shadows on Dean’s sweating back, they are more like a cheap souvenir.

Sam puts his face in the curve between Dean’s neck and shoulder and nuzzles him with a low growl until he turns his head away. Dean half expects to feel angel blood dripping into his eyes as he does, but it doesn’t happen and he casts his gaze across the room as they move together. Pleasure spikes under his skin, making his belly tremble as the muscles tense and Dean moans.

Outside the big bay window, the sun is gone and the sky beyond the looming black of the buildings looks like it’s slowly shrinking away. He watches it turning from lavender to grey as Sam digs his fingers into Dean’s hips and Dean’s body shudders. He puts his hands in Sam’s hair, grazes his nails down his back lightly and feels his sweat between his fingers as he thinks how one day… one day _soon_ … one day he’ll watch the world ending outside that window from this very bed as his brother fucks him.

The idea disgusts him, but as he’s thinking it and picturing it in his mind, he arches against Sam and comes.

Sam laughs like he knows exactly what’s going through Dean’s mind—and maybe he does—and tumbles Dean onto his back again. Dean can feel his body tightening around Sam’s cock as Sam throws his weight behind his thrusts and it would hurt if he wasn’t still right there in the middle of orgasm. As it is, Sam fucks him through it and Dean’s grazing fingernails rip down his back as every muscle and sinew in his body shakes. It’s pleasure that would be pain, but isn’t, and there is—perversely—something even more pleasurable in that. In the _knowing_.

When Sam comes, he moans into Dean’s skin as he licks at his sweat and the sound thrums down his body with tuning fork shivers. Dean cries out softly at the warm slide of his come inside him and turns his face to kiss Sam’s mouth. Sam stays like that for a long time, until their sweat turns cold and the room is utterly dark. Until Dean’s petting his fingers down his back in time to the steady rise and fall of his breath, thinking him asleep. Then he pulls himself up and crawls off of Dean, reaching for a pillow.

Dean lies right where Sam left him and stares up into the dark of the ceiling, seeing moon-shine on the wings of a dead angel. He hears Sam’s soft snoring and smiles faintly to himself.

He’s sated and thinking about knife blades and blood caught in the teeth of serrated edges.

~~*~~

Once upon a time, Dean ran away from home. He stood over the sleeping form of his brother, who had become corrupted down to the last dark vapor of his soul, who day to day made black and white seem so much more grey. He put out a hand to touch him, but didn’t. Instead, he turned away and quietly slipped out the door and down the stairs.

Dean was gone for less than a week before Sam found him and dragged him back to their apartment. If he were honest, he hadn’t tried very hard to hide. Disappearing took a big back seat to looking for a way to die that wouldn’t get him a one-way ticket straight to Hell, so Dean was half-conscious, stretched out on the stained and mildewed coverlet of a motel bed outside of Reno, Nevada with the taste of heroin lingering on his gums and a half empty bottle of Jim Beam dangling from the first two fingers of his left hand when Sam kicked in the door.

If he weren’t so fucked up, he wouldn’t have been so happy to see him. Or at least that’s what Dean tells himself. If he weren’t so fucked up, he also might have been a little embarrassed. Sam told him later that he’d been laying there like that so long he’d pissed himself and Sam had made him get in the shower and change his clothes before they left. To Dean, it had felt a little less than ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Nowhere near enough time for him to forget everything he’d learned from his momma about using the potty.

Sam took him home and Dean didn’t fight him about it. The next day, he woke up with his leg on a chain that was locked to the bed and such a massive case of the DTs that he managed to ask Sam just what the fuck he thought he was doing… but never got to hear the answer because he was too busy throwing up water and dry heaving.

When he had slightly recovered, Dean was ten pounds lighter than he had been when he ran away and still chained to the bed. By this time, he was just a little to tired to really care, though.

Sam crawled up in the bed with him one night and lay there petting his neck, humming some tune Dean recognized as a lullaby. “You can’t leave me,” Sam whispered in his ear. “Even if you hate me. Even if you really do want to go… you can’t. Not unless I let you. And Dean?”

“What?” Dean asked. He stared with unfocused eyes at the stars outside, thinking how strange it was that he could even see them this deep into the city. Maybe it was how high up they were. Or maybe he was just seeing things. “What, Sammy?”

“ _If_ you ever try to leave me again,” Sam murmured, pressing his mouth right against Dean’s ear as he spoke, “no matter where you go… I will _drag you back to me_. Do you understand?”

“I’m not an idiot, Sam,” Dean said, pushing him a little away so he’d stop breathing down his neck. “Of course I understand.”

Sam stroked a hand down his hair and settled down with a sigh to sleep. “Good. Now go to sleep.”

“Sam?” Dean said.

“What?”

“What’s the chain for?” Dean asked.

Sam snorted with amusement. “I’m not an idiot either,” he said gently. “I know you’re lying.”

~~*~~

There are approximately eight pints of blood in the human body. Of course one has to allow for things such as height and weight, but in the average human being there are eight pints of blood. That’s one gallon or four quarts or sixteen cups _or_ (and it amuses Dean just a little that he actually knows this) two hundred and fifty-six tablespoons. When you pour two hundred and fifty-six tablespoons of _anything_ out on a thick carpet it’s like walking on a squishy sponge.

Not that Dean’s doing a lot of walking at the moment. He’s too busy watching the sun chase the lattice shadows of the window frame across the wall as he hums “People Are Strange” to the rhythm of his flagging heartbeat. A little less than a minute ago he took the knife he’d hidden in the mattress to kill Sammy with and slashed his own wrists. The first cut on his left wrist was clean and right to the bone, but he made rather a mess out of his other wrist because he’s right-handed and he’d severed most of the tendons in his left arm with his first cut. Not that that makes one fuck-all bit of difference because he’s still pretty sure that there is something like one hundred tablespoons and counting soaking into their royal blue carpet and it’s _too late_.

“People are strange… when you’re a stranger… lalalalala…” Dean sings softly under his breath. The words are slurred quite a lot, but he’s pretty sure Mr. Mojo Risin’ will forgive him just this once.

Dean’s head is tilted back against the bottom curve of the window frame and his eyes are closed as he watches the bright beat of lights behind his eyelids. It’s his blood pounding with the light of the rising sun and he smiles because it actually _is_ just as pretty to watch as it sounds in his head.

“Dean?”

Dean makes himself open his eyes and it’s like lifting the lid of a manhole with his bare hands—which he’s done before, which means he finds it a bit weird as analogies go, but no less appropriate. “Hi, Sammy,” Dean says. He smiles at him and tries not to think about why Sam’s eyes are so wide and his skin so pale. He has little creases at the corners of his mouth and why is he gritting his teeth so hard? “I feel… like a sewer, Sammy,” Dean mutters.

“What the _fuck do you think you’re doing_?” Sam shouts, getting quickly up from the bed to go to Dean. He takes Dean’s face in his hands and tries to get him to look at him. Dean’s eyes keep going out of focus and distant, so Sam smacks him, which doesn’t really do much. It doesn’t even leave a handprint. “What are you doing?”

“ _Done_ ,” Dean corrects him. “Done already.”

Sam’s eyes search his face like he’ll find an answer written in Dean’s skin. “Why? Dean, _why_?”

“Tired,” Dean says. He blinks and it seems like it takes forever for him to open his eyes again, but he does. “Tired of… being used. Tired… of being afraid. So… _so_ tired of watching… you. Sam?”

“What, Dean?” Sam says. His fingers are now massaging at Dean’s face and throat, trying to work warmth back into the flesh in his hands.

There’s something wet and shiny under his eyes and Dean wants to touch it, but he can’t move his arms. “You’re crying,” Dean mumbles, wondering at it. “Smells… like roses. Are you crying roses?”

Sam swipes at his eyes and his fingers come away slick and scented with oil. “I guess I am,” he says.

“Sam?” Dean says.

“What?’ Sam asks.

“Love you,” Dean says. He lets his eyes fall closed.

Sam chokes on a humorless laugh. “But you’d rather go back to Hell than stay here with me,” he says sadly.

Dean takes a breath and lets it out. It’s thick and heavy like the deep breathing of a drunk about to pass out. This thought makes him smile a little. The smile is still there when he says, “Being here with you… like this… it _is_ Hell.”

Sam is kneeling in Dean’s blood and Dean doesn’t really know why he’s suddenly thinking about that, but he is. He’s thinking how blood goes cold really fast once it leaves the body so right about now Sam’s up to his thighs in Dean’s cold spoonfuls. He’s sitting there in Dean’s sticky, smelly eight pints of life. Well, maybe more like seven and a half because he’s not quite dead yet.

“Dean?”

“Hmmm?”

“Without anyone trying to take you, where do you think you’ll go when you die?” Sam asks.

Dean tries to open his eyes because his first reaction is to blink in surprise, but he can’t. It’s like each of his eyelashes has a weight on it. Maybe a Christmas ball. “Is this… a Heaven or Hell question?”

“I suppose it is,” Sam says.

Dean can feel Sam’s fingers in his hair and the smell of his blood is so strong. It’s kind of like pennies and oranges. _I’m bleeding oranges on the floor_ , he thinks. _What a big damn mess._ “Hell, probably,” Dean finally says. “Not a… very nice guy. Even if the hounds don’t want me.”

Sam puts his mouth to the curve of Dean’s jaw and Dean can feel his lips curl into a grin. “Hell, really?”

“Yes,” Dean says. He smiles a little himself and thinks he’s probably just a tad bit delirious. “Maybe you can visit.”

“Oh no,” Sam says. He nuzzles Dean and puts his hands out, running his fingers along Dean’s arms to his hands, where he laces their fingers together and squeezes. “No, I won’t be visiting you,” Sam murmurs. “You said it yourself; _this_ is your Hell. You’re not going anywhere.”

A sharp pain shoots up Dean’s arms and grabs him like fingers made of ice and razorblades. He doesn’t have the strength to get away from it and hardly enough to scream as it burns him up inside but he shudders and his fingers twitch. The fingers on his right hand still have tendons connecting them to muscle so they can clench and they do as biting armies of ants rush over his body.

Distantly, he feels his cold blood sliding _up_ his arm. Breathing heavily, painfully, Dean turns his head and looks down the length of his left arm to where Sam is holding his hand to watch it _flowing_ over his skin, making its way back into the wounds that expelled it. It’s still cold and it’s funny, really, _really_ goddamn funny how it burns so hot it makes him think of stars, how they grow just before they die. He hears Sam’s soft laughter in his ears and he remembers how dead stars are black holes. Which makes him think of Sam and metaphors and how sometimes he really wishes he’d paid more attention in school and church because a lot of the time he thinks it might be really simple and if he knew just a little bit more about dying stars or how Jacob wrestled with the angels, maybe he could fix it.

He watches his blood seep out of the carpet, which goes from black back to royal blue and he wonders if there might be some lint still in it when it slides back into his veins. If maybe he could die of _that_ and Sam’s determination to keep him living would still be for nothing. _Death by dust bunny_ , he thinks, then chokes on a laugh that comes out sounding a lot more like a croak.

“Yes, it’s very funny, isn’t it?” Sam says, his tone soft and almost soothing.

Dean coughs and shakes his head, but he’s smiling and his throat works with unvoiced laughter. “Sure isn’t,” he manages. “Sure… isn’t, Sammy.”

Sam leans over and licks down Dean’s left arm to his wrist where he runs his tongue between the lips of the deep wound. Dean hisses a breath through his teeth and his shoulders jerk at the pain of feeling his own tendons, fiber by fiber and cell by cell, knitting back together within his flesh. He thinks of a spinning wheel and how the princess spun gold for Rumplestilskin out of straw, which makes him wonder if he said Sam’s name or knew the magic word, if he could make him stop or take it back.

Probably not.

Sam takes his mouth away from the wound and leaves a trail of rose oil kisses up Dean’s arm to his mouth. “I told you not to leave me,” he whispers against Dean’s lips, kissing him as he speaks. “You said you understand. I told you… _I told you_ I wouldn’t let you go.”

Dean takes a deep breath that shakes in his chest as he inhales, then lets it out with a sigh as he opens his eyes and looks back at Sam. He lifts his right hand and lays his palm against Sam’s cheek. He can feel his stubble scratching and the oil of his tears slick on the pads of his fingers, so it wasn’t that bad. It’ll heal if he lets it and there will be almost no nerve damage.

“Why?” Dean asks Sam. He runs his thumb back and forth in the hollow below Sam’s eye and he suddenly notices how deep and dark the circles around them have become. The skin looks thin like parchment laid over ink. “Why won’t you? Let me go, Sam. Let me die. Why can’t you?”

Sam tilts his head a little to one side and looks at Dean in confusion. “Because I love you, Dean,” he says.

Dean stares at him and frowns. He wishes he could count the number of times he’s heard Sam say those words to him since he bought his contract from Pascal, but they don’t even number that many. Not even enough times to warrant a hand, or for that matter, a finger. He hasn’t heard those words from Sam in _years_. Truthfully, he doesn’t want to be hearing them now because if he could believe that Sam had stopped loving him, he could believe that Sam is all gone, that things are still comfortably black and white, that demons don’t love and angels don’t lose their faith—but most of all, that demons don’t love. Dean’s gone right on saying it whenever he feels it most, but Sam never ever gives it back to him. Not once.

He looks at Sam looking back at him and feels the healed cuts on his wrists like they’re set with hot gold; heavy and bright. By his knee on the floor there is a knife and he looks at it and considers the possibilities. If he did it again, would Sam keep fixing it? How many times?

“You’re a selfish asshole, Sam,” Dean says.

He touches his fingertips to Sam’s lower eyelashes and rubs his fingers together, feeling the oil with some kind of curious fascination. _Demon tears_ , he thinks, envisioning a perfume bottle with roses and imps, which makes him think of Frank, which of course makes him think of Pascal, which makes him want to retch.

“I love you too,” Dean says. He pushes Sam gently away from him and stands. He wants his clothes. He’s tired of being naked and he really just… wants a t-shirt, jeans and maybe a cup of coffee. “I love you, too,” he says.

Dean opens a drawer to get a pair of jeans and turns his head to look at Sam over his shoulder. Sam’s still sitting on the floor watching Dean move around the room with a half afraid expression on his face like he expects Dean to bolt at any moment. “I want to go out,” Dean says, tilting his chin up defiantly.

He expects Sam to refuse, so his eyebrows go up when Sam nods. “Okay,” he says. “Where do you want to go?”

“Starbucks,” Dean says, throwing out the first coffee place that comes to mind without thinking. “I want to go to Starbucks.”

Still watching him carefully, Sam goes to the dresser and takes out a shirt and pants, then gets dressed while Dean waits. “Fine, we’ll go to Starbucks,” he says. “Anything else?”

Dean eyes him suspiciously. “Yeah, I want go again tomorrow,” he says. “And… I want you to get rid of _this_.” He snatches at the gold key around Sam’s neck and holds it in his fist for a moment. When Sam doesn’t shove him away or try to make him let go, Dean jerks his hand sharply and the chain snaps.

“Okay,” Sam says. He follows Dean’s hand as he throws the key away. It bounces once on the carpet and lies by the wall under the window. “Is that it?”

“Is this a negotiation?” Dean snaps. “Because if this is a negotiation, there should be terms and shit, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Sam says. “I thought these _were_ the terms.”

“A coffee outing is not my only term then,” Dean says.

“Alright, fine, we’ll come up with some more,” Sam says. He takes his coat out of the closet and shrugs into it. “Think of what else you want.”

“Movie night,” Dean says after a minute, still watching Sam’s face like he thinks maybe he’s lying and any second now he’s going to see it in Sam’s eyes. “I want to watch _Pleasantville_ in surround sound. And I want a cigarette.”

Sam feels in his coat pocket and takes out a pack of Camels, which he holds out to Dean. Dean takes one out and Sam lights it for him with a snap of his fingers.

“And I want to drive,” Dean says.

Sam shakes his head as he takes his car keys out of his pocket. “I don’t think so,” he says, reaching around Dean to open the door. “Let’s try coffee and a movie, then see where it goes.”

 

  
**XXX**   



End file.
